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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24998614">The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley'>William_Easley</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Gravity Falls</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Con Job, Feels, Humor, criminals, huckster, mob, traveling salesman - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 04:07:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>52,917</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24998614</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Just before he was due to graduate from high school, Stanley Pines screwed up and his dad kicked him out. So began an odyssey that was to last eleven full years. This wandering tale will shine a light on some of the dark corners of Stan's prolonged and lonely trip.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Pass the Lotus, Please, I'm Starving</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or the characters of the show. These are the property of Alex Hirsch, the creator of the show, and the Walt Disney Company. I don't earn any money by writing these fanfictions, but just write for fun and practice and in the hope that others enjoy reading them.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>(1971-1982)</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>1: Pass the Lotus, Please, I'm Starving</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>By William Easley</strong>
</p><p>(May-August 1971)</p><p>The last Stanley Pines saw of his twin brother Stanford, Ford was looking down on him from the front window of their home. Stanley called out to ask him for help, encouragement, twenty bucks, anything—but Stanford just sorrowfully turned away while drawing the curtains shut.</p><p>In days that were to come and indeed they did come, far too many of them, Stanley often looked back on that moment. To his best recollection, he'd yelled, "Fine! I can make it on my own! I don't need you! I don't need anyone! I'll make millions and you'll rue the day you turned your back on me!" That was how he honestly recalled the time when his brother had just turned away, and his enraged father had thrown him out and had slammed the family door right in his face.</p><p>Memory, however, is a fallible, malleable thing. In cold fact, Stanley had not yelled those words, or even spoken them aloud. He <em>did </em>think silently, "I can make it on my own. I don't have to stay here!"</p><p>But what he said out loud, in a broken voice was simply, "Oh . . . Papa."</p><p>Then, blinking through tears of anger, he had driven away in the car that was supposed to have been his and Ford's joint high-school graduation present, a snazzy, not-too-old El Diablo convertible, something of a land yacht. Their father, Filbrick Pines, had come into possession of it in lieu of repayment of an informal loan he had made to a frequent client of Pines Pawns, a guy who yoyoed from being in the chips to being flat broke. Losing the car was a bad deal for the borrower, but a better deal (as Filbrick kindly pointed out to him) than losing both his kneecaps.</p><p>Now, with about thirty bucks in his pocket, the clothes on his back, and a few changes of outfit in his bag in the back seat, Stan set off. His other asset was the car itself, technically half Stanford's after their upcoming graduation, but Stan already knew he wasn't going to graduate. He probably had no real claim on the car—it should be all Stanford's now. Oh, well, when he came back a millionaire, he'd buy out his twin's share. He promised himself that.</p><p>That night in May he slept in the car, parked in the lot behind the Holy Mackerels' Lodge Hall on Finkel Street, near the eastern outskirts of town. He woke the next morning, a hazy warm Saturday, needing a bathroom and a breakfast. Stan looked around and decided that Harry Burgers could offer both. It wasn't that great a restaurant, and Ford had once suggested to Harry that "an apostrophe and an 's' right there might bring in more customers," but Harry Berger was a stubborn SOB.</p><p>Anyhow, Harry Burgers was right across the street from the lodge hall. Stan walked over and first hit the john, then sat on a barstool at the counter and chubby Dorine, a kewpie doll in a pink-striped apron who was twice his age, said, "Hi, good lookin'!"</p><p>Stan made a big production of looking back over his shoulder. "Whoa!" he said. "For a minute there I thought Paul Newman was standin' behind me!"</p><p>"Paul Newman!" Dorine said with her snorting laugh. "You're a riot! What'll it be this morning, Stanley?"</p><p>"How about a couple eggs over easy, home fries, bagel with a shmear, and coffee? And I'm gonna see a man about a dog while it's cookin', OK?"</p><p>"You got it, Sweetie," Dorine said, passing the order back to Pando, the cook.</p><p>Stanley went back to the men's room, where this time he washed his face and finger-combed his hair. He studied his bloodshot-eyed reflection in the mirror and muttered, "That'll do." Then he returned to his seat at the counter.</p><p>At this hour—Harry had only been open for fifteen minutes—the only other customers were three guys at the end of the bar who looked like they were going fishing and an old bum everybody called just Joe slumped in a booth in the far back corner, eating ham and eggs in tiny little bites with trembling hands. Stan knew that Harry staked the old fellow to a free breakfast every morning. Once he'd asked why, and Harry had said, "I remember Joe from when I was a kid. World War I vet. He was a good man until the Depression hit. Lost his business, lost his family, lost his mind. I can spare a little grub, and he needs it."</p><p>The three fisherman guys finished their breakfast and left, and then Dorine set a steaming plate on the counter in front of Stan. "Thanks, Dory," he said. "Looks scrumplicious!"</p><p>He ate the food without wolfing it, smiling at Dory as he did. Joe shuffled up to the register, mumbling, "What do I owe?"</p><p>Smiling, Harry said, "You paid already, see?" showing him a ticket marked PAID. "See you tomorrow, Joe."</p><p>"I have a big deal cooking," Joe said. "You're a good man, Harry. I'll let you in on the ground floor when the time is right."</p><p>"Thanks, Joe, that's great," Harry said. When the old fellow slowly left, Harry himself came from behind the counter to clean up the booth. Joe always spilled a lot.</p><p>Stan finished his own meal and put everything in a neat little group, plate, knife, fork. He even swept a few crumbs into the palm of his hand and dropped them and the napkin on the plate. "Delicious as always, Dory!" he said. "Freshen this up a little? Half a cup?"</p><p>She poured a couple more glugs of coffee in. "So what are you and your brother up to this morning?" she asked. "Got some big weekend adventure planned?"</p><p><em>Oh, yeah today's Saturday</em>. Stan had forgotten that.</p><p>"Aw, Poindexter's all busy gettin' ready for college," Stan said.</p><p>"That's nice," Dorine said, wielding a damp cloth on the counter. "You two planning to go to the same school?""</p><p>"What, me? No. No, no, no," Stan said. "I decided I don't want to hole up in an ivory tower, ya know, and let life pass me by. Me, I'm the kind of guy likes action. So I'm gonna take some time, look around, find a good racket, invest in it, make myself some dough, the whole bit."</p><p>She looked surprised. "Oh, well—I guess you'll see a lot of him, anyway," Dory said.</p><p>"Yeah, most likely. Thanks, doll. This is for you!" He left her a two-dollar tip, way, way generous, and the only two singles in his wallet. He was down to two tens and a five.</p><p>Breakfast was $6.90. At the cash register, Harry himself sat, curly steel-gray hair, a tubby chest and swelling gut in a ratty brown tee shirt and size XL green pants, which Stan figured he bought at the Army Surplus place. "Mornin', Mr. Berger," Stanley said to him. He spotted the sports section that Harry had been reading and asked, "Hey, how'd ya make out on the ballgames yesterday?"</p><p>Harry grunted. "Mr. Berger, who's he? I'm Harry, kid. How'd I do? Eh, dropped a dime on the Giants in Texas, but I made double that on the Mets/Braves game, and I picked up a hundred and twenty bucks on the Yankees/Indians game."</p><p>"No kiddin'? Stan asked. "Cleveland beat the Yanks, did they?"</p><p>"Eight to seven, favor of the Indians," Harry said.</p><p>"Good goin'," Stanley told him. "You know your baseball like nobody else."</p><p>"Nah, kid, I just hate the Yankees," Harry said with a grin that was missing three teeth. "So whadda we got?" He took the ticket from Stan and turned to the cash register.</p><p>Stanley had pulled out a quarter and was flipping and catching it. "Say, Harry, you're a wagering man. Flip you double or nothing for the ticket!"</p><p>"Ain't you a little young to be throwin' money away?" Harry asked.</p><p>"I'm eighteen!" Stan lied. He <em>would</em> be eighteen—but not until the middle of the next month. "Pop says I'm old enough to get a job, so I should be old enough to take a little chance, am I right? Come on, I pay double the tab if I lose, I get my breakfast free if you do."</p><p>"Lemme see the quarter," Harry said. He turned it over and established that it did indeed have two sides. "OK, young man, I'll teach you a lesson. You flip, I'll call."</p><p>Stan retrieved the coin. "Here we go. Call it!"</p><p>He flipped the quarter, and Harry said, "Heads!"</p><p>Stan snatched the tumbling coin out of the air, slapped his right hand on his left wrist and then said, "Before we look, how about we make it more interesting? Ten bucks says you're wrong. That's on top of the thirteen eighty I owe if I lose."</p><p>"Yeah, I'll cover that," Harry said. "Show."</p><p>Stan lifted his palm. "Tails, there you go."</p><p>"Crap," Harry said, making a rueful face. "Best two outa three?"</p><p>"Eh, I dunno, that's really pushin' my luck," Stan said reluctantly. "I mean, that'd be a lot to pay for an egg and a bagel."</p><p>"Come on, double or nothin' again," Harry said. "Gimme a chance to get even. I owe you ten, it'll be another twenty on top if you win. Thirty bucks. I toss this time, OK?"</p><p>"Sure, and I'll call. Here you go." He tossed the quarter to Harry. "Flip it."</p><p>Harry did, and while it glittered in the air, Stan said, "Heads!"</p><p>The coin landed on the counter and Harry slapped it flat. "If you win—" Harry began. But he moved his hand and revealed George Washington. "Double crap," he said as Stan picked up the quarter. "You're one lucky kid—wait, let me take a look at that thing again."</p><p>Stan held out his palm with the quarter on it, and Harry picked it up and examined both sides. "Yeah, it's a regular quarter," he said. He opened the cash register. "Sorry to doubt you, kid, but when you're bettin' money, you always check, even if you're bettin' with a buddy. Remember that. Lessee, that's ten bucks, then double that again—"</p><p>"Thirty bucks," Stan said. "But I'll settle just for the cost of breakfast."</p><p>"Nah, I'm no chiseler, kid," Harry said. He laid two tens, a five, and five singles on the counter. "There ya go. Always remember, kid, make sure the bet's square and even if you lose, never be a chiseler."</p><p>"Thanks, Harry, I'll remember that. You're a man of honor. See ya!"</p><p>On the corner, Stan paused for a moment to put the thirty bucks in his wallet. And in his pocket he jingled three 1964 quarters—a regular one, a two-headed one, and a two-tailed one. It was all in the presentation—show the honest quarter, make sure the mark gets one of the others, and if the mark should win, then suggest double or nothing again. Or if the mark is like Harry and offers a twofer, take it. You're on pretty safe ground as long as you can palm the coins and switch them out deftly.</p><p>"Geeze, I shouldn't cheat a guy like that," Stan told himself. Then his mood brightened. "On the other hand, Harry said he cleared a hundred and thirty smackers bettin' on baseball, so he can spare it."</p><p>OK, he had fifty-five bucks operating capital. He could live a month or more on that. So what next? Stan walked all the way down Atlantic Street as far as the beach and sat on a concrete bench on the seawall, thinking his life over. Even at seventeen-nearly-eighteen, he knew how dumb get-rich-quick schemes always were—but he needed a way to get rich. And quick.</p><p>What to do, what to do?</p><p>The sun was starting to heat up the beach, shining hard in his face. A few people were shell-hunting, a few boats cruising out on the molten-silver sea. On the horizon, a big freighter was heading north, probably to New York. Down the beach to the south, a nerdy-looking guy walked close to the water, sweeping a device over the sand and listening to a pair of headphones. Once in a while he'd stop and dig, sometimes not picking anything up, other times stooping to retrieve something. Some of the things he'd toss into the waves, some he'd drop into a kind of fanny pack, but worn at his side.</p><p>"Metal detector," Stan realized. He got up and crunched down across the sand. "Hello, sir!" he called when he got close to the fellow, who wore knee-length tan shorts and a faded yellow Hawaiian shirt spattered over with orange-and-green pineapples, plus a red-and-white Phillies baseball cap.</p><p>The guy raised his dark-gray sunglasses, revealing a face full of freckles and squinting brown eyes, but not unfriendly. "Yah?"</p><p>Stan gestured at the sand. "I see you're treasure huntin'. How's it goin'?"</p><p>The guy shrugged. "Meh, so-so."</p><p>"My name's Stan Pines, by the way," he said. "Metal detector?"</p><p>The guy nodded. "Lew Feltzer. Don't make no jokes, please. Yeah, metal detector. I'm beach combing. Wanna see?"</p><p>"Yeah," Stan said. "Ya know, Mr. Feltzer, I been thinking about getting one of those things. It really work?"</p><p>"Oh, sure," the guy said, unfastening the flap of a brown leather pouch on his belt. "Look here. I been out just two hours this morning, and this is what I found so far." He shook stuff onto his open palm. "Got about fifteen coins here, two of them maybe worth fifty to a hundred bucks each. Got a gold wedding band, that'll be worth at least eighty. Some interesting old rusty nails, a bullet, no money in them, though, uh, let's see, this." He held up something that looked like a skinny doughnut made of sand. "You can't hardly tell, but this is a bracelet," he said. "Have to clean it up to see if it's just like copper or if it's something nicer. Anyway, I already made a pretty good haul for just a three-mile walk."</p><p>"Huh," Stan said. "Will that thing really detect gold?"</p><p>"'Course it does." The guy showed him how it worked. You listened to the headphones, and when the disk of the detector passed over a metal, the headphones produced a tone—one of many. One was low, the rest gradually more treble, the last one higher-pitched still. Feltzer let Stan listen as he waved the disk over one of the nails, a corroded penny, then the gold ring. Stan heard the tones rise from <em>ruuuuh</em> to <em>raaaaah</em> to <em>reeee</em>! "Any of the tones from three up are good," Feltzer said. "I like to hear threes. You get a three tone, it's gonna be at least silver, could be gold."</p><p>"How much does one of these doohickeys cost?" Stan asked as he handed the headphones back.</p><p>"You can get real cheap ones for thirty bucks," the guy said. "Those ain't much good, though. Just one buzz for any kind of metal. It's a bitc—I mean, it gets boring stopping every five feet to dig and finding something like a rusted bottle cap or a crumpled-up beer can nine times out of ten. Good detectors start around a hunnert, a hunnert-twenty. OK, I gotta go now. I just have another couple hours to beachcomb. Nice talking to you, Stan."</p><p>"Same here, sir," Stan said. "See ya."</p><p>Stan walked back to the bench, lost in thought. <em>Get a metal detector, find gold, profit! Beautiful! Ha!</em></p><p>Though he was already beginning to misremember what he'd said, or failed to say, to Stanford, the last words his father had thrown at him as he was leaving hung in Stanley's mind like a shameful banner: "Until you make us a fortune, you aren't welcome in this household!"</p><p>"Ignoramus, am I?" Stan asked his memory of his father, which didn't unbend to reply. "Just ride on my brother's coattails, do I? I'll show you, Pop!"</p><hr/><p>Huntley's Hardware didn't open until nine, but the five-and-dime next door to it was open already. Stan went in and bought a little pack of ballpoints, three for eighty-nine cents, and a paper notepad, three by five inches, spiral bound, thirty-nine cents. He crossed the street to Seaview Park (except you couldn't see the ocean from it unless maybe you climbed the flagpole) and sat on an iron park bench in the shade of a big red maple tree that from time to time sent little helicopter seeds spiraling down.</p><p>On the first page of the pocket notebook, Stan wrote EXPENSES. He wrote the date and checked the time and then added, "8:50: None so far. Ready money: $55.25. Assets: Two crooked quarters."</p><p>He went about ten pages into the notebook and wrote: DEBTS. He put down Harry Berger's name and then "$30.00. Pay him back ASAP."</p><p>He'd make a fortune, all right, and he'd pay back Harry and anybody else that helped him out, but then he'd show up back home with suitcases full of cash, and then his dad would have to swallow his pride and admit he was wrong—</p><p>"Sixer," he muttered. On the next line of debts, he wrote "Pay Ford's way through college. I screwed up and I owe him."</p><p>Across the street, Mike Padrewski unlocked the door of the hardware store, and Stan closed and pocketed the notebook before crossing back over to it. The place smelled like steel and oil. He shopped for a few minutes, then found Mike—they had gone to school together until Mike dropped out the previous fall—and said, "Hey, Mikey, you got any of them metal detectors?"</p><p>"Camping supplies," Mike said. "Let me put these displays out front and I'll help you."</p><p>Mr. Huntley stood loading the cash register behind the counter, and his daughter Teezy (Teresa Zella, but don't call her that) had donned a red apron and was back in the aisles, straightening things up. Stan helped Mike haul out a carousel of blank keys and one of pocket tools—cheap screwdriver sets, a hammer that just might flatten an ant if you hit it hard enough and in the right spot, junk like that.</p><p>Then Mikey took him to the left rear corner of the store. "Got these," he said. "Uh . . . we carry six models. This one here's thirty-five, pretty basic. This one's fifty. This one's usually a hundred, on sale for eighty. That one is a hundred twenty, and this is the best one, but it's two hundred and ten."</p><p>"How do they work?" Stan asked.</p><p>Mikey showed him. It was pretty much the way Feltzer had told him. Mike recommended rechargeable batteries and a recharger, too—another twelve bucks or so. But even without that, the thirty-five buck job would take more than half of his money. "I'll think about it," Stan said. "I'll come back if I decide to buy."</p><p>He bummed around town until noon, had a sandwich in the deli, and then, missing home already, tried calling Stanford.</p><p>"If Dad answers, I hang up," he told himself as he stood in the phone booth near the movie theater.</p><p>But it was Mom: "Pines Pawns, open until nine tonight."</p><p>"Uh—hey, Ma," Stan said.</p><p>"Stanley! Where are you?" I been so worried!"</p><p>"Dad still mad?"</p><p>Caryn Pines was a compulsive liar. "He's fine, he's . . . " her voice trailed off. Sorrow squeezed truth from her: "Stanley, he's still mad. I'm sorry. Where are you, darling?"</p><p>"Lookin' for some way to get a start."</p><p>"Come home, you can keep out of Fil's way for a week or two—"</p><p>"Ma," Stan said, "you know him and me better than that."</p><p>After a long pause, she asked, "Do you need money?"</p><p>Stan had to fight not to beg for some and said, "Do I—nah, I'll find a job—"</p><p>Caryn nearly whispered, "Stanley, your dad found you left your savings book in your bureau. He's going to take the money out of your account on Monday."</p><p>Damn, he'd forgotten about that. He had, what, four hundred, maybe four-fifty, in there? He and Ford had done odd jobs and even had a paper route for a year. Ford's dough went for books and microscopes and things, but Stan had stashed his away. "That's OK," he said, though his voice was thick with pain.</p><p>"Listen, Stanley," Caryn said. "It's twelve-thirty now. At one o'clock I'm going to the fish market on Rustbucket. You be there. One o'clock, half an hour. Understand?"</p><p>"Yeah," he said.</p><p>It was a twenty-minute walk. Fruits of the Sea was a hole-in-the wall shop on the street that really was Rushbaker, but everyone called it Rustbucket, which better suited the run-down storefronts there. You walked into the market and the perfume of a hundred fish threatened to stifle you. Stan took a deep breath and entered.</p><p>And Caryn Pines came right behind him. "Here," she said, holding out a wad of cash.</p><p>"Ma," Stan pleaded. "I can't."</p><p>"You gotta," she said urgently. "Fil hadn't ought to take your money out of the bank, but he's gonna. And I can't stop him. It's not right, Stanley. Here, he doesn't know I've saved this. It's my own money. Take it, I'm begging you. Begging you, Stanley."</p><p>He took it. He saw that the first bill was a fifty. "I—I'll pay you back one day, Ma," Stanley said. "I—I—you know, don't make me say it."</p><p>She ruffled his hair. "I love you too, Stanley. Look, you need anything at all, you call me, see? On the psychic line, I won't hit the button to charge you by the minute or anything. And for God's sake, son, be careful. I—I have to buy some fish for dinner and get back, or Fil will get suspicious." She kissed his cheek. "You're so tall now. Go on, get out of here. I love you, Stanley. Fil's wrong, but he just doesn't understand. Don't hate us."</p><p>"Never," Stan said choking. "OK, thanks. Love you, Ma!"</p><p>He hastened out before he could burst into tears. Why was it so hard for him to say those words?</p><p>He rescued the Stanleymobile from its slot behind the Holy Mackerels' hall—though on Saturday it was unlikely to be towed. He drove to a park, pulled the car in under the shade of a couple of tall trees. He took Caryn's money from his pocket, sat behind the wheel, and counted. OK, things were better. Three hundred and eighty smackers, raising his capital to four hundred and forty.</p><p>Back to the hardware store, and he took the metal detector that was on sale for eighty bucks. But he also had to buy the rechargeable batteries and a recharger, so with tax he paid about a hundred dollars. That done, he drove to the Wavecrest, a crummy motel two blocks from the beach that had seen better days—a long time back, probably before he and Ford were even born. He could rent a room there for ten dollars a night, or fifty for a week.</p><p>A week? Well, if he could find lots of gold, a week would be enough, he figured. So he paid for one week, spent that afternoon walking around in the ankle-high grass behind the motel learning to use the metal detector, and came up with a little mound of buried treasure: a belt buckle probably from Sears and Roebuck, six pennies, two dimes, some corroded metal buttons, and a fifty-cent piece, none of the coins older than 1955, lots of tops from soda and beer bottles—even a church-key bottle-and-can opener, so rusty that it looked like a bizarre spear tip.</p><p>He bought dinner at a fried-chicken joint, ate it in his room, keeping a sharp eye out for the roaches that threatened to fight him over it, and promised himself that by that time tomorrow evening, he'd be lousy with gold.</p><p>Look out, world. Stan Pines was on the way up!</p><hr/><p>Or maybe not so much.</p><p>That next Saturday Stan paid for another week at the motel and had breakfast—a little package of stale toy-sized donuts from a vending machine and horrible coffee from another machine—before sitting down on the bed in his room to take stock of what he'd made over the past seven days.</p><p>In loose change, $22.17, a lot of that in pennies, some of the pennies green with age but not particularly valuable. Stan's cousin Vinnie Romanoff had a hole-in-the-wall hobby shop tucked away in a low-rent part of town, and Vin evaluated all the coins that Stan had suspected of having more than face value.</p><p>Stan had optimistically picked all the coins that had a date earlier than 1945, plus a few older ones so worn no date could be read. There were 14 of these, and of them all, only four were worth more than face value: a 1940 silver dollar, two quarters, and oddly a 1920 penny in pretty good shape. Still, altogether those four brought in only $12.00 from Vinnie. "You would've got more by auctioning them," he apologized. "Only the silver dollar and one of the quarters are both borderline fair/good condition. Some of the real worn ones might bring you in a buck apiece, but they're not collector quality."</p><p>Oh, well, he was still a little bit ahead of the game. He'd found three watches—none of them rare, Timex and Bulova and like that, and all corroded, ruined, worth nothing. Some nasty green-coated batteries. A pin that looked like silver with a pearl in it but turned out to be pewter with a glass bead. Six rings, but five were costume jewelry, and the last one was gold but only ten-carat, and Vinnie guesstimated its value as about twenty-five bucks. There were a few other things, and Vinnie helped total them up.</p><p>All things accounted for, Stan had earned right about $75.00 for his first week of beachcombing. And he'd gained a painful sunburn.</p><p>"This ain't as easy as I thought," he grumbled. He could live well enough on seventy-five bucks a week, but saving would be hard. Impossible, even. "And I can't go home," he told himself, "until I can bring Dad a fortune."</p><p>It dawned on him that living the life of luxury, lolling around and eating locusts, like in that story he and Ford had read in the fall of their senior year—no, wait, it wasn't locusts. Lotus. That was a flower, like a water lily, but another kind of lotus was some sort of fruit, and the sailors had eaten it, and—he couldn't quite remember.</p><p>Heck, nobody ever learned anything practical from a textbook. OK, he decided, he'd give it one month. He'd beachcomb like nobody else, and if he didn't boost his take to an average of, oh, a hundred and fifty a week, he'd throw the damn metal detector in the trash and find something else.</p><p>He hung around the motel all that day, resting up and smearing calamine lotion on his sunburned arms. He had another vending-machine meal for lunch, peanut-butter crackers, beef jerky, a Three Musketeers for dessert—so he set himself a limit of eight bucks for a good dinner and walked to Cruise Cuisine for a small steak, medium-rare, a baked potato with butter and sour cream, and a garden salad, ranch dressing. It came to a few pennies over eight dollars, but close enough.</p><p>He turned in early—nine o'clock—and set the unreliable bedside clock radio for four. Get a good early start, beat the sun, he figured. Comb that beach until maybe seven, then get a breakfast special somewhere, take the load off the feet for a couple hours, and then back at it sometime around ten in the morning. Really push it.</p><p>And by the end of July, if he didn't clear at least a hundred and fifty a week, he'd find something else. He should have been depressed, but he was Stan Pines.</p><p>"Something'll turn up," he told himself. "One way or another, somethng'll turn up."</p><p>You can be a world-champion liar, but when it comes to lying to yourself, there's one drawback.</p><p>You know not to believe yourself.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. What Song the Siren Sang</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>(1971-1982)</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>2: What Song the Siren Sang</strong>
</p><p>(July 1971)</p><p>Six weeks of beachcombing went by, and Stan's take to date came to something like $700. He was doing . . . OK. Not great, not great, but, you know . . . OK. On July 2, a Friday, he had managed to repay Harry Berger by going in for lunch during the rush and slipping an envelope on the lower counter, beside the cash register. It was addressed only to HARRY, and it contained a twenty and a ten.</p><p>Stan had waited until Dorine was on the register, and he put the envelope down before she hustled over to take his check. He paid his tab, said, "See ya," to Dorine, and left. Clean getaway. And Stan would have bet money—ha!—that Harry would never connect the cash with the bet the two of them had made.</p><p>He'd dropped a card in the mail to his mom with two fifties in it. He'd used a typewriter in the public library to address it, and he'd made up some BS company for the return address—"LADY OO-LA-LA LINGERIE"—and on the other side of the envelope he'd written "A SPECIAL OFFER ON PRACTICAL LINGERIE." But the card inside was a cheery one, a sun in the sky with beams shooting out of his happy face and the message HI FROM YOUR SUNNY BOY. Inside it said, "I'm warmly thinking of you." Meh, he could have written a better one in his sleep, but—anyway, he called mom on her psychic line to say, "You're gonna get a cockamamie lingerie envelope in the mail. It's from me. I did that so Pop wouldn't open it."</p><p>Filbrick was Puritanically squeamish about ladies' underthings. Stan figured it was safe.</p><p>He was heartily sick of the motel, so he bought a roach spray, packed his bags, carried everything into the Holy Mackerels lodge parking lot, unpacked, sprayed everything, changed clothes right there—this was midnight, nobody around—and sprayed what he'd been wearing. Then he sprayed the Stanleymobile, trunk and interior and even engine compartment.</p><p>He nearly passed out from the fumes.</p><p>But he went to an all-night coffee shop, imaginatively named ALL-NITE COFFEE SHOP, bought a decaf and a <em>Glass Shard Beach Beacon</em>, one of the two local newspapers, and read through the want ads, zeroing in on "Rooms for Rent" section. Most of them were either too far out or too far over his budget, but he found four possibles. One of them tickled his memory.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>Basement Suite, frnshd. 1 BR, kitchenette, private bath, private entrance. Single men only. $75 month, dep reqd. Utilities incl.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>The address was 1711 Bullhead Lake Park Ave N. That was about five miles from the town center, but probably not too far from North Glass Shard Beach, which might be a better hunting ground with the metal detector. Also, somebody he knew lived up that way—</p><p>"Carla!" he said, startling the waitress.</p><p>Carla McCorkle! He'd met her nearly a year before, when he was standing on line for the movies—it was the Bijou, he even recalled, and a flick called <em>Kid Grandpa, </em>no, wait, that was wrong, it was, uh, <em>Grandpa the Kid, </em>with Brent Westwood in the starring role—anyway, there he was on line when a girl behind him yelled for help, and some creep was trying to rip off her purse, and from out of nowhere came the old left hook that he'd learned in boxing class.</p><p>The girl had been Carla, and they went to high school together and recognized each other. They didn't really know each other, but she was grateful for his help and for getting her purse back. He wound up buying her ticket and they sat together in the movie, and afterward they'd gone out a few times, and she—he was pretty sure—lived on the south side of Bullhead Lake Park. He still had her phone number somewhere.</p><p>Anyway, those were the reasons that Stan showed up at 1711 North Bullhead Lake Park Avenue on Saturday morning, dressed neatly and smelling of bug spray. It was a one-story white frame house, neat on its small lot, with a small detached garage that faced onto Bell Road, the side street. He parked at the curb, walked up to the porch and rang the bell, and a short, bespectacled, plump woman who looked about fifty or sixty opened the door. "I'm not buying anything," she said.</p><p>"I'm not selling, Ma'am. You advertised that you had a room to rent," Stan said. "I came to ask about that."</p><p>The thick glasses she wore made her eyes look buggy, like a lizard's eyes. She stared at him for a minute. "No girl visitors allowed," she said. "No loud radio or TV if you have one. I'll need a seventy-five-dollar deposit, one month's rent, refundable unless you leave the place damaged or a mess. Interested enough to see it?"</p><p>"Yes, Ma'am," he said.</p><p>"What's your name, young man?"</p><p>"Stanley Pines."</p><p>"I'm Margaret Dewey, everybody calls me Peggy. Come round back and I'll show you the apartment."</p><p>They went around the house. Mrs. Dewey asked, "Is that red car yours?"</p><p>"Yes, Ma'am," Stan said. "I guess I can park it on the street?"</p><p>"If you take the room, you can use the garage. I don't drive any more. My daughter lives down the street and she drives me if I need to go somewhere. No extra charge for the garage, it's just empty anyhow. Here we are. Watch your step, young man."</p><p>The entrance to the basement rooms was down three concrete steps, the short stairway surrounded by an eight-inch curb. Kept the rain out, probably. Mrs. Dewey unlocked the door and went in. "Come on inside. Are you wearing some kind of cologne?"</p><p>"Bugby Gone," he said.</p><p>"My husband used to use coal-tar shampoo. It smelled like that. Well this is it. Nothing fancy, but this is it."</p><p>The door led straight into the parlor, a wide room. Off to the right was a little kitchen and dining area. Between parlor and kitchenette, a door led into another long room, the bedroom. A skimpy walk-in closet left a little hall that led into the bathroom—toilet, sink, shower. The furniture was plain but not shabby—sofa and armchair and coffee table in the parlor, little round table about big enough for two in the dining room, two-burner stove, narrow fridge, and a toaster in the kitchen. Single bed, bureau, small desk and chair, bedside table and lamp in the bedroom. Near the bathroom a heavy-framed door wore a padlock.</p><p>The place would be sort of dark, just two windows, one in the parlor, one in the bedroom, both small and high on the wall. But the walls were a pale pearl-gray and that helped.</p><p>"This looks good to me," Stan said.</p><p>"What do you do, Mr. Pines?" Mrs. Dewey said.</p><p><em>Mr. Pines. </em>Nobody had ever called him that before, and it gave him pause for a moment. "I'm in asset recovery," he said. "It don't pay all that much, but I'm aiming for bigger things, and the price is right for me. Do I need to sign a lease, Mrs. Dewey?"</p><p>"Just the deposit and the first month's rent will be fine. I'll give you a receipt. This is the third of the month. Your next rent will be due on August third. If you decide to move out, I'll ask for two weeks' notice. Is that fair?"</p><p>"Sounds fine," Stan said.</p><p>"There's a phone what-do-you-call it, jack, but you'll have to pay if you want to get one installed. Gas and electric are included in the rent, phone's up to you. That door next to the closet is locked. It's to my junk room, where I store old furniture and my Christmas tree. don't try to open it. Do you smoke?"</p><p>"No, Ma'am."</p><p>"Good, it's a filthy habit. Anyway, no smoking in bed. That's how house fires start."</p><p>"I won't smoke at all," Stan said.</p><p>"All right. You'll need linens. You can use the towel in the bathroom and the blanket that I have on the bed. Laundry day comes, there's a Wash It All on Biddley Street, half a mile toward town. Come up to my living room and I'll take your money and write out your receipt, give you a key, and you can move in right now if you want."</p><p>So it was done. Stan parked the El Diablo in the garage—he was glad that he was now across town from home because he had nightmares sometimes about his dad seeing him and demanding the car back, though come to that, Dad didn't go out all that much. He hauled his stuff in, stashed the metal detector in the closet, hung up his clothes, put his underwear and socks in the bureau.</p><p>Then he took a long, hot shower and hoped his clothes would air out soon. He checked the kitchen cabinets. Four plates, four glasses, four each of forks, spoons, and knives, one frying pan, two pots, two bowls, an old-fashioned stovetop coffee pot, two coffee cups, a few cooking utensils.</p><p>All right. He had a place of his own. Sort of. Next he needed supplies. After having forked over a hundred and fifty to Mrs. Dewey, he began to think he'd better get his butt in gear and find some gold PDQ. But he still had a few hundred, so—he took the Stanleymobile to an A&amp;P, which was also on Biddley Street—he spotted the laundromat not far away from it—and bought some basic groceries, milk, eggs, bread, butter, cans of soup and beans, spaghetti and tomato gravy, lunch meats, cheese, sodas, oh, yeah, bath soap, dish soap, box of laundry detergent. On the way back, he spotted a Sav-A-Lot and stopped there to buy three towels and two sets of sheets.</p><p>After dropping that off at his room, he went out again, spotted a phone booth near a branch of the First Jersey Bank, parked, and dialed Carla's number.</p><p>And her mom answered and told him, "Yes, she's home. Carla! For you!"</p><p>Stan's heart beat a little faster. Then the cheerful voice he remembered came on the line: "Hello?"</p><p>"Uh, hi. Just thinking about you and wondering how your summer's shaping up."</p><p>"Stanley! I'm fine. Uh, I mean, yeah, you know. It's so good to hear from you!"</p><p>"So I guess you probably got a fella now?" Stanley asked.</p><p>"Um, no. No, I don't. You got a girl?"</p><p>"Nah, I just keep thinking about you, though."</p><p>"That's so sweet!" She was speaking softly, and he supposed she didn't want her mom to listen too close.</p><p>He said, "Hey, guess what? I'm living across the park and lake from you now."</p><p>"No way!"</p><p>"Big way. I'm out on my own, trying to make a go of it, you know. Hey, there's supposed to be fireworks in the park tomorrow night. Wanna go watch 'em with me?"</p><p>"I love fireworks!"</p><p>"OK," Stan said, grinning all over his face. "It's a date. Maybe we could grab a burger first somewhere?"</p><p>"There's the Juke Joint," Carla said. "Do you know it?"</p><p>"Never heard of it."</p><p>"It's down on Bergh Street. It's this fifties-themed diner. Pretty good burgers, and they have these oldies in the jukebox, sometimes live music, they don't mind if people dance. If, uh, you know, if we feel like dancing."</p><p>"Carla," he said, "when I'm with you, I always feel like dancing. Only you gotta promise me one thing."</p><p>"What?" she asked.</p><p>"The fireworks. If they're real loud and I get scared—you gotta promise to hold me real tight."</p><p>"Oh, you're bad!" she said, laughing. "But I promise. Stanley?"</p><p>"Yeah, what?"</p><p>"Why didn't you graduate?"</p><p>He took a deep breath. "It's kind of a long story. Mind if I wait and tell you in person?"</p><p>"Of course not. I missed you these last couple of months."</p><p>"Yeah, missed you, too. It's funny, right before everything blew up, I was gonna ask you, I mean I was if I could get my nerve up, if you wanted, uh, you know, to go with me. Steady."</p><p>He held his breath, but she said softly, "You can ask me that tomorrow. When we see each other."</p><p>"Sure thing," he said. "What time should I come pick you up?"</p><p>"Whenever," she said. "The earlier, the better. We've got some catching up to do. Say five? Is that too early?"</p><p>"Five is great," he said. "You haven't seen my car yet. It's a classic."</p><p>"I can't wait! Oh—Stanley, don't get mad—"</p><p>"What?" he asked. "I won't be mad."</p><p>"When you come, don't just honk the horn. Come in and meet my dad and mom. They like that. They've heard about you, but they'd like it if you rang the bell and came in and said hi."</p><p>"Deal," he said, relieved. "And I'll be on my best behavior. Tomorrow at five."</p><p>"I can't wait," she said again.</p>
<hr/><p>He didn't sleep much that night. At four, he got up, broke out the metal detector, and headed for the beach. He saw the sun come up over the ocean, told himself this was going to be a good day, and started listening for that tone.</p><p>Four hours later, he had what he considered a good haul. There were thirty-some coins, not one but three rings that gave the sharp, shrill tone of gold, not costume junk, a gold chain with some probably fake pearls on it, but you never know, one hoop earring that he figured was silver, a probable bracelet, though it might be a woman's watch on a metal band, and the usual rusty bits of iron, aluminum beer cans and the pull-off tabs from them, rusty bottle caps, some just plain junk.</p><p>He was back at the house by eight. He put the sandy treasures in the sink, with a screen over the drain, and started to rinse them while he brewed coffee. He popped two slices of toast in the cranky old toaster, put a little gob of butter in the frying pan, and cooked himself a couple of eggs. The coffeepot began to squirt its little brown geyser into the glass knob of the top.</p><p>He sat at the table and ate his cooking and wished that when he'd bought food he'd remembered salt and pepper. Heck with it, he'd pop into the store on his way to his and Carla's date. He washed the dishes, left them to drain dry, and picked up the coins and stuff from the sink.</p><p>Heck, he'd really need to get himself a phone installed. How did you do that? Probably Mrs. Dewey would know. You probably had to call New Jersey Bell and put in a work request or some deal. Stan decided not to bother her today—tomorrow would be soon enough. But he was antsy, so he drove out again, stopped at a mom-and-pop convenience store for one of those picnic salt-and-pepper sets, that'd do for a month or so, he supposed, and then used a pay phone again to call Vinnie.</p><p>"Yeah, I can take a look at it," Vinnie said. "What's the deal, calling this early?"</p><p>"I got my own place and I'm kinda jumpy, I guess," Stan said. "You ain't open today, are you?"</p><p>"It's Sunday, and it's the Fourth of July, Stanley. N-o spells no. But I'm meetin' a guy for lunch at noon. You know where Mama's Table is?"</p><p>"On Bay Drive? Yeah. Kinda ritzy, ain't it?"</p><p>"Bring about twenty bucks and some singles for a tip," Vinnie said. "You got a jacket and tie?"</p><p>"Yeah." It was true, too—one each, a gray wool jacket, rumpled but clean, and a black tie. "They expect you to dress up at this place?"</p><p>"They want a regular shirt, preferably white, at a minimum," Vinnie said. "You don't got a tie, they'll lend you one, but Stanley, don't embarrass me in front of Mr. Pinter."</p><p>"I'll wear the jacket, I'll wear the tie. Did you say Pinter?"</p><p>"Yeah, Eddie Pinter. Don't tell me you know him."</p><p>"Nah, heard of him. Labor organizer, right?"</p><p>"Yeah, among other things," Vinnie said carefully. "Listen, don't talk to him unless he talks to you, get me? He's working to get a branch of the BWOA started here, and he wants to ask me about some contacts. I'll introduce you, but sit quiet, eat your food, and don't butt in. I'll look at your stuff right after we eat."</p><p>"That's OK," Stanley said. He hung up and wondered about his cousin. Fast Eddie Pinter, that's what they called the guy who was going to eat lunch with them. He was from Philadelphia, and Stan had heard tales of him—a shady character they said. Shady like Mammoth Cave was shady. His dad had once seen him at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, and his verdict was "Guy stinks of hoodlum."</p><p>Oh, well. Stan wanted Vinnie's expert eye on the pile of coins and the rings, so he'd go to lunch, he'd be polite, he'd keep his mouth shut, except for chewing, and his ears open.</p><p>He got his sport jacket and took it into the parlor. He opened the front door and kept it propped open. Maybe the fresh morning air would take the bug-bomb smell off it.</p>
<hr/><p>Stan arrived at the restaurant five minutes early and sat in the car drumming his fingers on the wheel. Then he saw a Caddie turn in. He didn't know the guy driving, but when it parked, Vinnie hopped out of the passenger side and hurried around to open the door for the older guy at the wheel. Stan got out and walked over to them.</p><p>"Stanley!" Vinnie said. "Mr. Pinter, I told you about my cousin. Here he is. Mr. Pinter, this here's Stanley Pines. Stan, meet Mr. Edward Pinter."</p><p>"Pines," Pinter said, running his eye over Stanley. Pinter was a short, compact, but wiry guy in his thirties, short hair in a GI cut, craggy face, sharply tailored shark-skin gray suit, white shirt, electric-blue tie.</p><p>"Mr. Pinter," Stanley said. "Glad to meet ya."</p><p>"You play football in high school, kid?" Pinter asked.</p><p>Stan shook his head. "No, sir, I wasn't coordinated enough for that. I box a little."</p><p>"Box a little." Pinter put up his cupped hands, like a catcher behind home plate, anticipating the pitch. "Gimme a sample. What's your best shot?"</p><p>"Left hook, I guess," Stan said.</p><p>"Hit my hands. Don't hold back."</p><p>"Really, sir?"</p><p>"Yeah, I just want to see."</p><p>"OK."</p><p>Stan got into position and slammed his hand into Pinter's with a meaty smack, making the older man flex his elbows and take a half step back. "Not bad, kid, not bad. I see you took a good stance first. Balanced your weight nice. You do this in the ring?"</p><p>"No, sir," Stan said. "Just, you know, my dad had me take lessons, give me some confidence. Keep the wise guys from hasslin' me and my brother."</p><p>"Lookin' out for family. That's good," Pinter said. "Well, gentlemen, let's go get some hot groceries and then me and Vinnie are gonna talk a little shop."</p><p>Stan wasn't at ease. The restaurant was too fancy for him, really. He had like four forks! But he followed Mr. Pinter's lead. Pinter ordered swordfish and a salad and some kind of wine. Stan ordered swordfish and salad and water. Vinnie gave him a grin and ordered a minute steak, baked potato, asparagus, and beer.</p><p>Stan didn't say a word as Pinter got Vinnie to give him some names of connected guys—people who worked as charter fishermen, lifeguards, beach concessionaires, that kind of business. Pinter wrote the names down in a leather-covered pocket notebook with a gold fountain pen. Not a ballpoint. A real fountain pen.</p><p>Pinter seemed in a good mood, and he ordered cheesecake and coffee for everyone at the table. And he picked up the check.</p><p>"I'll pay my part," Stan said. "I kind of butted in here, I wasn't invited, so—"</p><p>"Nah, Stanny," Pinter said. "You got a good punch, you're a good kid, I can tell. Plus you're polite. That's a big thing with me, a guy who's polite. My pleasure. You ever need a job, come and see me, I may have something. Here you go." He took out a business card, jotted something on the back of it with his gold pen, and handed it to Stan. "Now, Vinnie, you're OK if I go on, right? I got more people to see."</p><p>"Stan will give me a ride back home," Vinnie said. "Won't you, Stanley?"</p><p>"Yeah, of course," Stan said. He got up as Pinter stood. "Thank you for lunch, Mr. Pinter. It was very good."</p><p>Pinter nodded gravely and offered his hand. He had a firm handshake, but he didn't try to crush Stan's hand in his grip. "Good mitts on you, Stanny," Pinter said. "I like that in a guy. And not soft. You've done work, I can tell. I gotta go, Vinnie—give me a call sometime, I'll tell you how this pans out."</p><p>Vinnie and Stan both left a tip—though Pinter had already put a generous one when he signed off his Diners Club receipt—and they headed out. "What did you think of him?" Vinnie asked.</p><p>"Eh, seemed like a nice guy. You want me to take you to your apartment?"</p><p>"Yeah, I'll look at the stuff there. Pinter liked you, Stan. Better be careful."</p><p>"Huh?"</p><p>"'You ever need a job, come and see me.' You know what he's talkin', don't you? He's talkin' muscle."</p><p>"I don't get it," Stan said.</p><p>"He thinks you'd make a good strong-arm guy. Hired goon," Vinnie clarified. "Stan, he's a Mob guy."</p><p>"No kiddin'!"</p><p>"Eh, as wise guys go, he's pretty cool. Never heard of him havin' anybody bumped off, but, you know, sometimes there's rough stuff. Hey, I like your car."</p><p>"Thanks," Stan said, but he was keenly aware of the little card that Pinter had given him. He'd glanced at it before tucking it into his shirt pocket. The engraved card listed him as President of the Brotherhood of Beach Workers, address in Philadelphia. The reverse side had the handwritten address of his local office, right here in Glass Shard Beach. "I wonder if there's any money in gooning."</p><p>"Stan" his cousin said, "this is the best advice you'll ever get. Don't mess with the kind of business Fast Eddie Pinter does."</p>
<hr/><p>Wouldn't you know it, Pines Pawns was closed on Independence Day, and when they drove past the Holy Mackerels' lodge, there standing outside the front door, jawing with his fellow Mackerels, was Filbrick Pines, burgundy fez and all. He jerked as he evidently recognized the car.</p><p>"Crap!" Stan said. He made a quick turn into a maze of cross streets. "Shoulda known that Dad would be here, drinkn' beer and gassing with the old farts. I suppose the lodge is throwing its Fourth of July lunch today."</p><p>"I saw some posters for it," Vinnie said.</p><p>At Vinnie's apartment house, Stan carefully parked the car down the block, tucked into a narrow alley He and Vinnie walked to the apartment, where Stan displayed the goodies he'd picked up. "Well, middling. Some of the jewelry I'll take, but there's nothing top-drawer. Huh. This is newish—a senior ring from the high school. They overcharge for these things, but I'd go thirty on it. Hey, you got your own ring?"</p><p>"Yeah, bought it last fall, but I don't wear it. I feel like a phony, 'cause I didn't graduate."</p><p>"What'd they charge you, a hundred?"</p><p>"Almost. Eighty."</p><p>"You want, I'd give you fifty for it. It's in better shape than this one, I bet."</p><p>"Nah, I'll hang onto it for old times' sake. So what's the offer?"</p><p>Vinnie added figures the old-fashioned way, with a pencil and paper, not a calculator. "Not too shabby, Stan. I make it eighty even. That OK?"</p><p>"Yeah, I'll take it," Stan said. "What I don't like, it's the uncertainty. I mean, day before yesterday, twelve dollars. Today eighty. This just ain't reliable income."</p><p>"If you're thinking of working for Fast Eddie—"</p><p>"Nah, but I need to look around to find something regular. Regular hours, regular paycheck. Well, thanks, Vinnie, that was the best lunch I've had in, I guess, ever. Oh, hey, here, I'll write down my new address for you. It's the basement apartment, you go around back to find the door. I'm puttin' in for a phone tomorrow, but I don't know how long it might take to get one."</p><p>"All the way across Bullhead Lake? Guess it's cheaper there."</p><p>"Not bad," Stan said. Guess I'll drive the long way around to get back. I don't want Dad on my tail."</p><p>"He's probably too drunk already," Vinnie said. "Sorry, Stan.""</p><p>"Can't get mad, you're right. Lucky for Ma, he only ties one on every two-three months, is all. Gotta go get ready for my date! See ya around, Vinnie."</p><p>"Yeah, next week, a Saturday will be better. I'll be in the shop as usual."</p><p>"Gotcha."</p><p>He drove twelve miles to travel four, got to his room at two, and immediately plopped down on the bed. He needed to close his eyes for a minute, but prudently, Stan set the alarm for four.</p><p>Yeah, Carla and fireworks, don't want to be late for that!</p>
<hr/><p>At four, the alarm buzzed, he woke up, flailed around a bit, and finally shut the noise off. "Just got time," he told himself. He took off his white shirt, washed his face, shaved—OK, he slapped on a little Brut 33, blotted some off with a towel—<em>less is more,</em> as his old high-school nemesis often said. His name was Lester Moore.</p><p>He brushed his teeth, rinsed with mint-flavored Stingaree mouthwash that tasted like he was gargling with molten lava. He decided against the jacket—it really needed pressing, at the very least—and instead put on his black, white, gold, and blue long-sleeved Paisley shirt. He rolled the cuffs up to his elbows and checked out his reflection. Yeah, yeah, pretty fly. He collected the present he had for Carla and put it in his pocket. By then it was four-thirty. "Show time," he said.</p><p>He drove very slowly indeed and arrived at the McCorkle house. It really was just about directly across the park from Mrs. Dewey's house. He could walk it in ten minutes, probably, if he had a rowboat or some deal to cross the lake. Driving, even at a snail's pace, he arrived about eight minutes early, sat in the car for the duration, then drew a long breath and got out. The walkway to her door was seven miles long, or it felt that way.</p><p>He pressed the doorbell button. A kind of dumpy guy in jeans and a red tee shirt answered. "You," he said with a smile, "must be Stanley Pines."</p><p>"Uh, right. I mean, yes, sir. Yes, I am."</p><p>The guy shook his hand. "Ward McCorkle. Come on in. Carla will be out in a minute." He raised his voice and called, "Emery! Carla's young man is here."</p><p>A woman who looked like Carla, but twenty years older, emerged from the next room. "Oh, sit down, sit down," she said. "Carla always runs ten minutes late. Hi, I'm Emery, Carla's mom."</p><p>"Like something to drink?" Ward asked. "Soda? Lemonade?"</p><p>"No, thank you," Stanley told him.</p><p>"Hi, Stanley!" Carla herself, in, wow, hot pink hot pants that made her look (sorry, sorry) hot! And a short-sleeved white sweater top and some kind of flower, a daisy or a magnolia or something white anyhow, in her beautiful long brown hair. "Ready to go to dinner?"</p><p>"Humma humma," he said. "Uh—that means 'yes' in Russian. My Mom's family came from Russia, you know. My car is outside. Why I talk so much with words from mouth? You look nice!"</p><p>"I like your shirt!" she said. "Let me just grab my clutch—"</p><p>"Beach towel!" her mom said. "You don't want to sit on the park grass in bare legs to watch the fireworks!"</p><p>"Thanks, Mom!" She glided out of the room.</p><p>Her dad put his hand on Stan's shoulder. "Have her back by eleven-thirty," he said in a friendly voice. His teeth were clenched in a fatherly smile and reminded Stan of a bear trap he had once seen in the hardware store.</p><p>"Sir, yes sir!" he said, just catching himself before saluting.</p><p>"Let's go, Stanley!"</p><p>They went out. The El Diablo seat was hot from the sun, but Carla spread the doubled towel over it. "The thing about short shorts," she said, "is that you either burn your bottom or it gets all sticky! OK, let me tell you how to get to the Juke Joint. Does the radio work?"'</p><p>"Uh, yeah, sure, turn it on and find something you legs. You like!"</p><p>She tuned it to the mellow bellow of New Jersey, 108.8 on your FM dial. A Carpainters tune had only just begun. "I love this song!" she said. She crooned along with the brother-sister duo:</p>
<hr/><p>"Why do birds fly up in the sky</p><p>Whenever you stroll on by?</p><p>I'll tell you true—</p><p>Cause they love you,</p><p>And so do I!"</p>
<hr/><p>It's a wonder that Stan made it to the Juke Joint without taking out a fireplug or street light, but somehow he did it.</p><p>"Wait a sec," he said when he parked outside the diner, which resembled one of those old-timey railroad-car style restaurants, all blue and white sign and shiny stainless steel. "Carla," he said, "you're beautiful."</p><p>"Thank you, Stanley!" she said, blushing prettily.</p><p>"I'm not just saying that, either. You're a knockout. Way out of my league. And you sing like—what are those things? Like mermaids, but with beautiful voices?"</p><p>"Um—sea nymphs?"</p><p>"Sirens," Stan said. "That's it. Only beautiful girls with terrific pipes, and they don't ride around on top of cop cars. That's you. You're my sweet siren." He took another deep, deep breath. "You know what I said on the phone? About wondering if you'd like to go steady?"</p><p>She bit her lower lip and nodded.</p><p>He took out the gold chain. "Here, this is for you. I bought my class ring last fall, but I never got used to wearing it. I want you to have it if you would accept it."</p><p>She would. And she kissed him, right there on the seat. The car seat, that is. And they went in and the place was just lousy with atmosphere, and they had a big juke box, no song younger than 1960, and they danced those corny old dances and it was like they were on the same wavelength.</p><p>They must have eaten—Stan could never remember later—and then they were sitting and leaning back atop the beach blanket on the park lawn, with crimson rockets screaming up to burst with a bang into giant chrysanthemums of fire, and that wasn't half as exciting as having their arms around each other's waist.</p><p>They snuggled a little in the car after the show, and then Stan said, "I gotta get you home by curfew. I don't want this to be our one and only date! Hey, next time we come here, I'll wear like jeans and a white tee shirt, OK?"</p><p>"You'd look manly in anything!" she said.</p><p>At 11:25 on the nosey, he walked her to the front door, they kissed chastely, and she whispered, "I can't wait to do this again."</p><p>"Anytime," he said. "I'm gettin' a phone tomorrow. Arrangin' for one, anyhow. I'll give you a call, tell you my number."</p><p>She kissed him again. "You already got my number," she teased. "Dream of me! Goodnight, Stanley!"</p><p>"Goodnight, Carla."</p><p>He floated back to the car, headed for home—Pines Pawns—realized what he was doing, pulled a U-turn when he could, and made it back to Mrs. Dewey's house before midnight. He parked in the garage, closed the door, got out his key, unlocked that door, and went into the dark room. He was humming the song that Carla had sung.</p><p>
  <em>Flyin' high like a bird in the sky. Oh, yeah, baby. This is the best night of my life. Nothing could possibly mess this up!</em>
</p><p>He switched on the light.</p><p>"Hey, Stan." It was Vinnie. He had been sitting on the sofa. In the dark.</p><p>"How'd you get in here?" Stan asked, more belligerently than he intended.</p><p>"Locksmith skills. Listen, your ma called me. There's trouble."</p><p>"What?" he asked.</p><p>"Sorry, Stan," Vinnie said. "It's your dad."</p>
<hr/>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Cave of the Cyclops</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>(1971-1982)</p>
<hr/><p>(July-September 1971)</p><p>
  <strong>3: Cave of the Cyclops</strong>
</p><p>"About time," one of the vertical Holy Mackerels slurred. Stanley and Vinnie had just climbed out of the Stanleymobile. It was dark in the lodge parking lot—which made sense, since the time was close to 12:40 AM. The cool night wind brought in a faintly salty scent of the ocean, hard to detect under the alcohol reek coming from the two guys. "He's over here. Passed out now." The burly guy switched on a flashlight and shined it in Stanley and Vinnie's faces. "You're his boy, right? Stanford?"</p><p>Vinnie snorted, but Stan immediately said, "Yes, I'm Stanford, that's correct. He elbowed Vinnie. "Was my father any trouble?"</p><p>"Blind drunk and ornery," the second man said. "He bloodied my nose."</p><p>"Punched me in the gut," the guy with the flashlight said. "Fil's like that when he gets a load on. Anyhow, you guys take him back home. Last time I brought him to his place, he wasn't even half this bad, but his old lady beat me on the head with a broom."</p><p>Stan opened a back door of the El Diablo. He and Vinnie hefted the slack body of Filbrick Pines, heavy in that way that loosely lolling bodies have. Stan grunted. "Let me get him partway onto the back seat," he said. "You keep him from sliding out and I'll go around and haul him in."</p><p>"He stinks," Vinnie objected. That was true. The sour smell mingled beer and the acidic reek of vomit.</p><p>The two other Mackerels laughed. "Yeah," the guy without the light said. "He set a world record for pukin'. Now, you tell your ma that we didn't touch his wallet." He belched and then hiccupped.</p><p>"Mgrf," grunted Filbrick. "Whozzat?"</p><p>The guy with the light, helpfully shining it into the car, said, "It's your boy, Fil. Stanford. He's gonna take you home."</p><p>"Don't wanna," Filbrick complained. He heaved, trying to sit up, but in the middle of the effort he passed out and fell back again.</p><p>Vinnie shut the door. "I think we oughta go now," he said.</p><p>"Right, get in," Stan said. He slammed the rear door, then opened the driver's-side door and got behind the wheel. He immediately rolled down the window.</p><p>Before he could close the door, the guy with the light said, "Hey, hey, just a second, he lost somethin'. It's over here somewheres. Wait a minute." He wandered around near the bushes over near the building for a little while before coming back. "Here ya go," he said. "Don't want to lose this. They're ten bucks each to replace."</p><p>He flopped something in though the open window, and Stan grabbed it. "Thanks," he said. "We'll take it from here." He dropped the thing on the seat, paid no attention when it bounced off and fell on the floor, put the car in reverse, did a quick three-point turn, and set off toward Pines Pawns. "I hope Ma's expecting him," he said.</p><p>"What did the guy give you?" Vinnie asked.</p><p>"That dopey hat they wear. Like an Egyptian in a mummy movie, you know." Flat top, no brim, tassel.</p><p>"Fez," Vinnie said.</p><p>"Yeah, I guess." Stan yawned hugely. "Jeeze, I hope I don't go to sleep at the wheel."</p><p>"You want, I'll drive us back to your place. I got to go back to pick up my car anyhow."</p><p>"Thanks. Man, I'm gonna have to spray the back seat with deodorizer after this. I wish Dad wouldn't do this."</p><p>"He's not a full-time drunk."</p><p>"Nah, but benders once every three, four months don't make him much better than one."</p><p>They turned onto the pawnshop's street. "I'm just gonna park at the curb," Stan said. "Don't think the cops'll ticket us. This late it won't matter."</p><p>He pulled up so the passenger-side backseat door would be near the front of the shop, putting the long car about halfway between the pawnshop and the Hot Belgian Waffles breakfast restaurant next door. Vinnie climbed out and opened the back door.</p><p>Stan came around the car. The streetlight showed Stan lying on his back, an elbow-crooked arm thrown across his face. "Stay here and make sure he don't climb out or anything. Keep the door open to air the car out a little bit."</p><p>Instead of going to the street door, Stan took the narrow alley between the shop and the restaurant to the back door. He pressed the rear doorbell, which rang only in the upstairs rooms, in the family code pattern: three quick dings, then a long one. He stepped back and looked up. Filbrick's and Caryn's bedroom window lit up a dim yellow—bedside lamp.</p><p>After a couple of minutes, light came on in the first-floor back room of the shop, too, and then Caryn opened the alley door. She had tied a kerchief over her hair, up in rollers, and held a bathrobe closed. "Stanley!" she said.</p><p>"Hey, Ma," he said, feeling embarrassed. "Sorry to get you up. Vinnie and me brought Pop home. He's drunk again."</p><p>"I figured," she said. "He's passed out, huh?"</p><p>"Uh—"</p><p>"If he wasn't passed out, he'd be fighting you. Right?" Mom said.</p><p>Stan nodded. "Yeah. Oh, hey, his buddies are gonna tell him that Ford picked him up, 'cause they mistook me for him. Don't let him know it's me, OK?"</p><p>Caryn sighed deeply. "Yeah, OK. Where is he?"</p><p>"Out front, in the car. Vinnie's with me. I think me and him can lug Pop upstairs."</p><p>His mom stepped aside so Stan could come in. "All right, but try and be quiet. Shermy dropped little Alex off so he and Monica could have some alone time, and it took me a long time to get the little guy to sleep after the fireworks. They're gonna pick him up tomorrow morning, so he won't catch it if Stan has a bad head and the baby cries or anything."</p><p>They threaded through the shop and to the front door, which Caryn unlocked and opened. It was difficult maneuvering the inert Filbrick out of the car and then upstairs quietly, but they managed it with Stan holding onto his arms and Vinnie his legs. At the top of the stairs they hauled him into the bathroom and into the tub—Caryn said, "I'll strip him down and bathe him. Looks like he was sick all over himself."</p><p>"Where's Ford?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Oh, he won't be back until tomorrow morning. He went to the orientation at that college he's going to. He called and said he was gonna stay over the Fourth because the traffic's bad on a holiday. He borrowed Fil's Chevy."</p><p>"College? West Coast?" Stan asked, surprised.</p><p>Caryn shook her head. "Backupsmore University," she said. "In Newark. Ford's good grades got him a scholarship there, and really he says it's just as good as Princeton or Rutgers."</p><p>Stan said, "Good," without putting much stock in that. Mom was a compulsive liar.</p><p>"Listen," Stan said in little more than a whisper. "Like I said downstairs, just let Pop think it was Ford picked him up, OK? He wouldn't like it so good if he knew it was me. Tell Ford when he gets back. If Pop thanks him for bringin' him home or anything, just tell him to go along with it."</p><p>"I will," she said. "'Stanley, are you OK for money?"</p><p>"Oh, yeah," he said, grinning. "I got a job that brings in a little income. Not getting' rich, but at least getting' by. Thanks. I'm savin' up, and I'll get the rest of what you loaned me back to you before long."</p><p>She touched his face. "You shouldn't. Use that for what you need. Only Sicily Rao told me she saw you just walking around on the beach for hours."</p><p>Good old nosy Sicily, who with her husband Knuckles owned and ran the nearby sandwich shop. "Yeah, she probably did," Stan said, "but that's part of my job, keepin' the beach clean."</p><p>They heard Filbrick yell something unintelligible, and Stan kissed his mom's cheek. "Seriously, Ma, take care of him and don't worry about me. I'm really gettin' along pretty good. I gotta go. You need to get Pop to bed, and Vinnie's waitin' in the car for me. 'Night now."</p><p>Vinnie was sitting behind the wheel, and Stan handed him the keys. "Thanks for this," he said.</p><p>Vinnie started the engine. "Eh, it's family, right? I don't mind."</p><p>Stan napped in the passenger seat while Vinnie drove them back to Mrs. Dewey's house. When they got there, Stan climbed out of the car and opened the garage door, Vinnie parked the Stanleymobile inside, and then he walked to the street, got in his heap of a car, a decade-old Rambler American, and with a wave drove off into the night.</p><p>Stan returned to the garage, his nose wrinkling. Without any air freshener on hand, he rolled down all the windows of the El Diablo, hoping that the smell would dissipate overnight. Tomorrow he could pick up some Lysol or something. As he rolled down the front passenger-side window, he noticed the fez on the floor and picked it up. He took it inside and popped up on top of the bureau, thinking he'd need to get that back to his dad soon, if he could find an anonymous way of doing it.</p><p>In the bathroom, he stripped and dumped his clothes in the hamper and took a shower, still smelling, or maybe only imagining he was smelling, the rancid odor of vomit. When he went to bed, he muttered, "Aw, Pop," but drifted off into an exhausted sleep.</p>
<hr/><p>The next morning he asked Mrs. Dewey if he could use her phone to call New Jersey Bell. She said he could, provided he would see if he could tighten the top hinge on the front door—it was coming loose from the frame.</p><p>He took care of that first. He removed a screw, saw it was short, and asked, "Do you have any longer ones? This one's lost its bite."</p><p>Every kitchen has a junk drawer, and in hers she found three flat-head screws that were an inch longer than the one Stan had taken out. "My husband kept these around," she said. "He'd never throw away a nail or a screw."</p><p>"He sounds like a smart man," Stan said. He used the longer screws, having to exert some pressure to turn the screwdriver. "There. That's gonna last a good long time. Try the door and see."</p><p>She did. "You fixed it. Thank you!"</p><p>"Nothin' to it," Stan said.</p><p>"The phone's in the front hall. Book's on the top shelf of the stand."</p><p>He looked in the front of the phone book, found the service numbers he needed, and dialed the one for phone installation and new service. He talked to two people, put his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and called, "Mrs. Dewey?"</p><p>She came from the kitchen. "Yes, Stanley?"</p><p>"The guy wants to know if the phone jack is all hooked up and ready."</p><p>"Yes. Our daughter lived down there for three years, and she had her own separate line. I suppose it just needs to be turned on or whatever."</p><p>"Thanks." Stan relayed the news, got a pleasant surprise—an installer was scheduled to be in the area that day and could drop in to bring a new phone and activate the line. Catch was that he'd have to be there.</p><p>He hung up and called out, "Thanks, Mrs. Dewey. They say they can put me in a phone today."</p><p>"You're welcome. You did me a favor. I'm making breakfast. Would you like some? Just as easy to cook for two."</p><p>"I'd appreciate a cup of coffee."</p><p>"Certainly. Come this way. I eat in the kitchen. No use laying the table just for me."</p><p>There was a breakfast bar, and he sat there as she poured him a cup of coffee. "Thank you," he said again. He took a sip. "This is good."</p><p>"I always drink one cup a day," Mrs. Dewey said. "Gets me started. You sure you don't want a couple of eggs with bacon?"</p><p>"Naw, I'm good, but thank you."</p><p>"Then have a slice of toast at least. I feel strange, eating with my guest going without."</p><p>"That'd be fine."</p><p>As he munched his toast and Mrs. Dewey ate her bacon and eggs, she said, "I don't want to pry, but you seemed busy last night."</p><p>"Kinda," he said. "I had a date, and we went to see the fireworks in the park. I dropped her off and came home, and I heard from my cousin that my dad was sick, and I ran over to help out."</p><p>"I hope it isn't serious," Mrs. Dewey said.</p><p>He shrugged. "Now and then he drinks too much."</p><p>"Oh, I'm sorry, dear."</p><p>"It's Pop. He's a right guy most of the time. Has a business, and him and Ma raised me and my two brothers. I don't mind a little payback. Only—never mind."</p><p>When they finished, he offered to help with the dishes. She washed, he dried. Then she asked, "Only what?"</p><p>Stan felt his face get hot. "Well, um, he was sick when we put him into my car. There's a smell."</p><p>"What kind of upholstery do you have in your El Diablo?"</p><p>"Leather, why?"</p><p>She reached up in a cabinet and handed him a quart bottle half full of white vinegar. "Here, use this. Wash the seat down with pure vinegar. Then go over it with warm water and do a second wipe with vinegar. That'll clear it up."</p><p>"Really?" he asked.</p><p>"I was a mother with a little girl prone to car sickness, and my husband also over-indulged now and then. Trust me on this, it'll work."</p><p>"I'll buy you a new bottle of vinegar next time I'm at the store," he said.</p><p>"That'll be fine."</p><p>"I better go downstairs. The phone guy's coming sometime today."</p><p>"I'll watch for the truck and send him around if he can't find it on his own."</p><p>"Great."</p><p>For four hours he sat in the apartment, listening to the radio (volume low) and feeling antsy. He'd missed a day of beach-combing, but maybe he could spend a couple extra hours out over the next three days or something. Then the phone guy knocked on the door. He came in, moved an end table next to the sofa to find the jack, and asked, "This spot OK?"</p><p>"Yeah, fine, anywhere," Stan said.</p><p>The phone guy brought in an olive-green Princess phone. "This is all I got on the truck," he said. "This model OK?"</p><p>"Long as it's a phone."</p><p>He plugged it in, then said, "Let me go outside and check the box, and as soon as I activate it, you should be in business."</p><p>That took him less than five minutes. Then Stan had to pay the installation fee up front. The guy left a copy of the Glass Shard Beach phone book and a thick envelope full of contracts and handbooks and what have you. Last of all, the guy hand-printed his new phone number on a circle of paper that he popped into the center of the dial with a clear plastic cover over it. He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and waited. "Schuler here, installation job 5. Gimme a callback at this number as a service check." He hung up, and after half a minute the phone trilled. He picked it up. "Line coming in clear? OK, good, I got a good signal here, too. I'm closing out."</p><p>He said, "OK, bud, you've got yourself a phone. Watch the mail for a confirmation message. Your bill will come due the second week every month. Either stop by the office to pay in cash or write a check and mail it in. That's it."</p><p>He took off, and Stan reached for the phone. He'd told Carla she'd be the first, but—he dialed his mom's psychic line first.</p><p>"Psychic advice, ninety-nine cents a minute, this is Madame Romanoff, go ahead."</p><p>"Ma, it's me."</p><p>He heard a soft click, and then she said, "You're off the hotline clock, Stanley."</p><p>"How's Pop?"</p><p>"Sleeping it off. Ford's home, he's helping out in the shop."</p><p>"Listen, I got a phone now, you wanna write down the number."</p><p>"Wait, I'll get my address book from my purse." A pause and then she said, "I'm just going to put this in as South Pharmacy. SP for you. So if Fil sees the number—"</p><p>"Yeah, I got it," Stan said. "Here ya go." He read the number in, she copied it down, and he asked, "Busy?"</p><p>"Pretty busy," she said. "Lot of people coming in for loans or to shop."</p><p>"I'll let you go, then. Call me if Pop's sick or out of sorts or anything."</p><p>"Ford's here now, but thanks. Fil will be all right. You know how he is—a one-day bender, then two days of recuperation."</p><p>"Good luck, Ma. I love you."</p><p>"You take care of yourself, Stanley."</p><p>Stan hung up, then sat looking at the phone for a minute. His palms were sweaty. He rubbed them on his jeans and then picked up the receiver again and dialed Carla McCorkle's number.</p><p>Her mom answered, called Carla to the phone, and after saying a shy "Hiya," Stan said, "Hey, Carla, guess what? I got a phone now! I'm calling you to give you my number."</p><p>That was the business of five minutes.</p><p>The conversation went on for four hours.</p>
<hr/><p>Weeks went by. July burned its way into August, and August smoldered toward September. For Stan, they were good weeks. He made a steady haul of from one to two hundred dollars a week. He lived cheap, opened a bank account (something Ford had done at age 12, but Stan had never seen the point of it). He wrote checks to the telephone company and nobody else because he paid cash for about everything else, including rent.</p><p>He and Carla dated three times a week on the average. They went to the beach. A summer carnival pulled into town, and they went, riding the Octopus and the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Bumper Cars and the Ferris Wheel. Stan watched the rubes playing games with odds stacked impossibly against the player. He won Carla a purple teddy bear at the ring toss with a secret move of his own—passing a twenty-dollar bill to the carny, who then was OK with letting Stan win the two-buck stuffed toy.</p><p>Anyway, the toy impressed Carla. They saw movies once or twice a week, once driving to the Twi-Nite Drive-In to see. . . . some sword-and-sandal epic.<em> Testocoles and the Underdressed Amazons of Erotic Island</em> or some such. They didn't see much of it on account of foggy windows.</p><p>The fly on the horizon of Stan's ointment was the realization that beachcombing was never going to be steady enough as a source of income to let him get really serious about Carla. After a pretty good August, the take fell way off as September began. He didn't know why. Maybe it was because three successive storms came ashore near Glass Shard Beach in July and August, but then a dry spell ensued. No big storm-shoved waves crashing in meant no new goodies being swept in with the flowing and ebbing water. In the first three weeks in September, Stan made less than a hundred and fifty from his treasure hunting.</p><p>He'd sent his mom another hundred bucks, and he called her once a week on Pop's lodge nights. She told him that when Fil woke up from his long sleep following his Fourth of July bender, he had no memory at all of how he got home. "But he remembered that he saw you in the car, Stanley. He was all hot to report it stolen, only Ford wouldn't let him. He said you needed it more than he does. He got a good scholarship to go to college, and he can buy himself some good little used car, that'll do fine. He'll live on campus, eat on campus, study on campus, and doesn't think he'll be coming home for weekends more than a couple times a term. "</p><p>Whatever. Stan felt relieved that somehow his brother had talked Filbrick out of pursuing the question of ownership.</p><p>At least when times got lean on the beachcombing front, they always had the Juke Joint. It wasn't what you'd call a classy date, but the burgers were reliably good, and the juke box always had some early-days rock'n'roll record on it that a guy and a gal could have a good time dancing to. Sometimes cheap dates are the best ones.</p><p>On Labor Day, Stan went with her family to a picnic at Beale's Orchards, a park on the site of what had once been an expansive apple farm. Now the land belonged to the state, and the remaining apple trees, Winesaps and McIntoshes and Granny Smiths, grew gnarled and unpruned. But it was a nice green space with playgrounds for the kiddies, picnic tables and grills for the grownups, and a ten-acre lake for wading and fishing.</p><p>While Carla and her mom were getting ready to grill burgers and wieners, Carla's dad said, "Let's walk over and see if anybody's fishing."</p><p>But on the way, he said, "You and Carla are getting serious, huh?"</p><p>Stan didn't reply for a moment. Then he said, "I like her a lot. I think she likes me, too."</p><p>"Think you want to make something of it? Have you two talked about settling down?"</p><p>Another pause. They stood close to the lake, watching a dad and his two young sons bait-casting about a hundred feet away. The water sparkled in the sun. Pondhawk and meadowhawk dragonflies helicoptered low over the water. Brant geese cruised the middle of the lake like a convoy of battleships seen from a great distance. "I don't think we could talk about that," Stanley said, "until I can find some way to make money. You know. Support a family."</p><p>"That's smart," Carla's dad said. "You think about that. I don't want you making heavy moves on my girl—you understand what I mean—until you get your job situation in hand. Think about that."</p><p>"I agree with you, Mr. McCorkle."</p><p>"She's out of school. I can't tell her what to do or who to see any more. But as long as she lives in our house, I can damn sure set her a curfew. And I can try to look out for her best interests. You do that for family. What's wrong?"</p><p>"Nothin'," Stan said. "Aw, I—you know, a year ago, I'd say my family, my pop and ma and brothers, we were that kind of family. But now—I'm kind of the bad guy of the Pines. My dad says I am. And I guess my brother, too." He straightened. "I made mistakes. I never meant to hurt anybody. I'm tryin' to make up for it. But it—it's—"</p><p>"It's a hard road back," Mr. McCorkle said.</p><p>"Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. Yes, sir, it is."</p><p>"Man to man, Stanley—swear to me that you won't take advantage of my girl. I think you're a likely young fellow. You can make something of yourself. But until you got yourself a direction for your life, until you're sure you can support a family, keep it to a simmer. You understand me? You promise me that?"</p><p>"Yes, sir," Stanley said. "I swear."</p><p>"Let's go have ourselves some lunch."</p>
<hr/><p>On Tuesday morning Stan was back on beach patrol. He was working the south stretch of waterfront again, scuffing through the sand in green flip-flops, green shorts, and a white undershirt. The tang of fall was in the air, and the heavy feeling of a storm coming in soon, a nor'easter, he thought.</p><p>Well, that would be good for business. Big storms stirred things around, washed things up, tumbled them and buried them. Even heavy stuff. Heck, he'd found a four-pound Revolutionary-War era cannonball once after a blow. It was too corroded to be worth anything, but still. So a reasonable storm might strew, what did they call 'em, doubloons, pieces of eight, real honest-to-God pirate treasure. That'll be the day, he thought.</p><p>But he was also thinking about Carla. He and she had a talk after the picnic. He'd told her, "You know, I gotta find some way to make a decent livin' before we can think about settlin' down."</p><p>And she snuggled up to him and murmured, "Who wants to think about settling down?"</p><p>The evening didn't end in a quarrel, really, that was too strong a term for it. But she did get the idea that Stan might be cooling off a little. He tried to show her, within limits, of course, that he wasn't. However, he did confess to her, "I just gotta do some serious treasure hunting, Sweetie. I'm runnin' low on ready money."</p><p>"Want me to come with?"</p><p>"Nah, it ain't a day at the beach," he said. "Well, I mean it is, but you get up before daylight, it's chilly out there before the sun comes up, you drag along a step at a time listenin' for a signal, you get one, you dig, and most of the time it's a bottle cap or a beer can or somethin' equally worthless. It's work, Carla, not fun."</p><p>So . . . she was a little disgruntled, but she said she understood.</p><p>That morning wasn't looking great. He'd found the usual scatter of coins, none of them old, none looking rare. Quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies. About seven, eight bucks. Costume jewelry. Rusted nails, rusted bolts, a rusted round thing that might have been a pin-on campaign button.</p><p>Sunrise came and he bought a donut-and-coffee breakfast at a dock restaurant, one that was ready to close for the season but was hanging on for the rest of the week. Then, at nine, he went out again. The next seven hours of walking produced very little more. More lost coins, a maybe-gold ring, another, an engagement ring—whoever lost that must be real unhappy, but it was a poor couple's ring, maybe a quarter-carat diamond if that. Not a heck of a lot money, but maybe enough to semi-salvage a disappointing day.</p><p>Stan plodded back to the boardwalk and piers. He stopped dead and stared at something he'd somehow never noticed before: a billboard on the side of a salt-water taffy stand on the pier. "Traveling Salesman," it said. "Be your own boss!" it said. Stan took only a few seconds to decide. Then he took the headphones off and dumped the metal detector in a trash can.</p><p>At the stand, he asked, "What about that sign on the back? Traveling salesman? Who do I see?"</p><p>The stand owner told him, "Oh, that's Jimmy Wiesel's sign. He's got an office downtown. He hires people to go door to door hawking his stuff, but listen, guy, he's a crook. Nobody works for him longer than a month, 'cause he don't pay up when it's time. You interested in that, the thing to do is get your own product goin'. Make it something people want and do a good job of selling, and you're in business."</p><p>Huh.</p><p>But that would require money.</p><p>So Stan went back and retrieved the metal detector. He'd have to think this thing through.</p><p>Back at Mrs. Dewey's, he dumped his findings in his safe—a cigar box—and showered and changed to jeans and a short-sleeved shirt.</p><p>Then he wondered, "Where'd I put it, where'd I put it?" He searched through drawers until he retrieved the little card, the one that Eddie Pinter had given him. The office for the BOBW local branch was on Ogden Street, in the oldest part of town.</p><p>He drove there, passed the place, and recognized it as what the locals called the Cave. It wasn't really a cave, but a building with big arched openings, one on Ogden Street, one opposite it on Atlantic. The place was a whole block deep. Back in the day, it had been a farmers' market—the arched passage had been open, so a man could drive a horse-drawn wagon in and unload his cabbages and tomatoes and whatever. Now the arches were walled in, and the former sales plaza had been divided up into offices.</p><p>Pinter's was the first one on the left. The rest of the offices were mostly closed, some of them, by their look, for years. A cut-rate lawyer had an office halfway down, a seedy-looking dentist the one on the far end. Both were closed for vacation. They, like Pinter, were identified by three-by-five cards in frames on the doors. Temporary marks of temporary businesses.</p><p>Stan opened the door—and froze.</p><p>A cheerful guy was laughing as he kicked a small man in a sport jacket and gray pants, curled up in a fetal position on the floor and already unconscious. The kicker wasn't a big lug, about Stan's size, but muscular. He giggled as he kicked, and he made so much noise that he didn't notice Stan behind him. An open door led into an inner office, and from that he heard Pinter's voice, yelling in pain.</p><p>Stan walked up to the kicker, tapped his shoulder with his right hand, and when the guy, ugly, scarred face, nose busted a long time ago and healed up crooked, spun around, the left hook came in hard. It knocked the wind out of the guy, and then Stan gave him the right, and as the guy doubled over, already on the way to the floor, Stan threw in a knee for good measure and the thug went to sleep.</p><p>Quickly, Stan stepped through the open door. Pinter, his face bloody, lolled in an office chair. A really big guy loomed over him. He gripped a tire iron—one of the flat, foot-long prybar types—and struck Pinter on the point of the left shoulder with it. "Get out of town, understand?" the guy said in a flat, crazy voice, and for a second Stan thought the guy meant him.</p><p>Pinter saw him but didn't react. Pinter's voice was leaking blood. He spat and said, "You bastard."</p><p>The guy drew back the tire iron.</p><p>Stan picked up a fallen wooden chair.</p><p>"Guess I gotta kill you," the tall guy said.</p><p>Stan broke the chair into smithereens over the guy's neck and head. The assailant dropped the tire iron, turned around, staggered but not out. He wore a patch over his left eye. "Razor!" he yelled.</p><p>Stan retrieved the tire iron.</p><p>"Razor, you idiot, get your ass in here!"</p><p>"He's asleep," Stan explained. He tapped a lullaby on Eyepatch's head, and the big guy folded up, too.</p><p>Pinter was laughing. Bloody-nosed, bloody-mouthed, with a goose egg swelling on his forehead, but laughing. "Stan Pines," he said. "I'll be damned." With a groan, Pinter pushed himself to his feet. "what happened to Lou? My assistant?"</p><p>"There was a guy kickin' another guy outside. One of them might be Lou."</p><p>"Come on, help me, we gotta work fast before Leary wakes up."</p><p>Pinter yanked electric cords from a fan and lamps, and they tied the big guy and the kicker. Then Pinter bent over the man who had been kicked repeatedly. "He's just out," he said. "The pug is Race Bannion, they call him Razor. Watch him, I got to get the first-aid kit."</p><p>They'd hauled both thugs into the anteroom. When the big guy started to moan and curse, Pinter had casually slugged him again, sending him back to sleep. "What's all this about?" Stan asked as Pinter came back with a blue-and-white plastic box of first-aid supplies.</p><p>Pinter knelt next to the guy in the sport jacket. "Eh, the owners of the beachfront businesses—Management—sent them to beat us up or kill us because we're organizing the workers. We ain't the bad guys here."</p><p>Pinter worked on Lou with a first-aid kit. An ammonia ampoule brought him around. "Eddie," he said weakly. "I think I got ribs broken."</p><p>"Easy, easy," Pinter said. "We'll get you to a doctor."</p><p>Painfully getting to his feet, Lou said, "I'll hold together good enough. What do we do with these?"</p><p>"Pa would take 'em for a boat ride out on the ocean and leave 'em," Pinter said.</p><p>"Hey, I'm just gonna leave—" Stan began.</p><p>"Relax, Stanny, I'm not my Pa," Pinter said. "We're not gonna kill them. But we're gonna send a message to their bosses. Make sure they don't send any more tough boys."</p><p>They found the two guys' panel truck parked outside. Lou said he thought he could drive it. Pinter locked up his office and said he'd follow, and then he and Lou would go visit the doctor. To Stan, he said, "Bad time to hang around my office, kid. How can I get in touch?"</p><p>Stan told him his phone number. Pinter nodded. "I got it."</p><p>"I could write it down—"</p><p>"No, I got it. You help me load these guys in the back of their truck. I swear we ain't gonna kill 'em." Pinter gook out his wallet and peeled off a few bills. "Here you go, Stanny. You go home, mind your business, I'll be in touch. This ain't to buy your silence. It's just a reward. For comin' to the rescue, maybe savin' Lou's and my life. You can go on home. Me and Lou, we got a delivery to make."</p><p>Stan, shaken now that it was all over, numbly shook his head, refusing the money.</p><p>Pinter tucked them in Stanley's shirt pocket and patted his shoulder. "Later, Stanny. We'll talk later."</p><p>After helping Pinter, Stan got in his car and drove to Mrs. Dewey's. In his room he washed up and looked at his hands. They were swollen, but no broken bones. "Oh, boy," he said. He went out and sat on the edge of his bed, arms bent, forearms resting on his knees. He suddenly felt very tired.</p><p>It was almost an afterthought to look at the money Pinter had handed him. </p><p>Five fifties. And something else—a black eyepatch, the one the huge guy had worn.</p><p>"Oh, boy," Stan said again.</p>
<hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Farewell to Dear Calypso</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>(1971-1982)</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>4: Farewell to Dear Calypso</strong>
</p><p>(September-October 1971)</p><p>Though Stan was grateful for the extra money from Eddie Pinter, he began to feel discouraged again as a week went past without his getting a call from the man or having even one really good day beachcombing. But finally on Friday, September 17, the phone rang when he was in the shower, following his daily beachcombing session. He got out dripping, grabbed a towel for a quick dry-off and loin wrap, and made it to the phone before it stopped ringing. "Don't hang up, Stanley Pines here."</p><p>"Stanny. Did I catch you at a bad time?"</p><p>"Uh, kinda an awkward one," Stan said, trying to readjust the towel so it would catch more drips. "Just got in from treasure hunting and was takin' a shower to get the sand and salt off. It's OK, I can talk."</p><p>"Oh. Sorry about that, kid. How was your luck?"</p><p>"Had better, had worse. Been a bad run lately, but first thing this morning, I found a length of a broken gold chain, about eight inches, that might be from the 1800s. I'm pretty sure it's real gold, and think it's a good grade. Might be worth a couple hundred. Uh—'scuse me, this is Mr. Pinter, right?"</p><p>"Yeah, right," the voice said with a chuckle. "Sorry, usually I got a secretary makes calls, but I promised to phone you personally. You got time to come and see me? Just for a little face to face talk that'll maybe take two, three hours of your time."</p><p>"Your office?"</p><p>"That's a no. You can guess why. We'll meet out of town. The place is gonna be a restaurant, Derry's Steak House. Get a pen, I'll give you directions."</p><p>Stan put on undershorts and pulled a pair of walking shorts over them, then found a pen and his pocket notebook. "Got it, ready."</p><p>"OK, kid, first, after this is done, you're gonna forget everything, name of the restaurant, these directions, everything. Bring the directions with you so I can make sure they're destroyed. Know why?"</p><p>"To protect me?" Stan guessed.</p><p>Pinter sounded somewhat impressed: "You're sharp, kid. OK, here's the way: Take the Garden State Parkway north to Exit 82 West. Not 82, but the next one. You're gonna turn left, then drive for about five miles. . .."</p><p>"Got it," Stan said when Pinter finished. "When do we—"</p><p>"Leave now. You'll pass a couple gas stations and a burger joint, then right after you'll see the restaurant on your right. Park behind it, out of sight of the street. Go in and tell the girl at the stand you're there for the Flagler party. She'll call a waiter, he'll bring you back. Should take you a little bit less than one hour to get there. You don't show up in ninety minutes, don't bother, meeting's off."</p><p>"I'll be there."</p><p>Stan hung up and then dressed in record time, started the car, checked the gas—it was OK—and headed inland until he hit the on-ramp for US 9, aka the Garden State Parkway, and turned north. He kept mostly to the slow lane because he was pretty sure that he could make it by the deadline.</p><p>And he did, nearly ten minutes early. It was getting along in the afternoon by then, close to five, and when he parked, as directed, behind the restaurant, he hopped out and hurried inside. It was early for dinner. At 4:55 in the afternoon, no customers stood lined up at the welcome station. A plain-looking blond in her thirties, wearing a green plaid skirt, white shirt, and green vest, greeted him. "One?" she asked.</p><p>"Uh, I'm here for the Flagler party," Stan said.</p><p>He saw recognition in her eyes. "Just a second. Barry will help you." She looked around, caught a waiter's eye, and beckoned.</p><p>Barry, in green plaid bell-bottom jeans, a green vest, and white shirt, was his age, or about that, and when the receptionist said, "Flagler, Barry," he murmured, "This way, sir."</p><p>Instead of leading him to a table or even a private room, though, Barry skirted the edge of the dining room—only three tables occupied at the moment—led him down the hall toward the restrooms, and then opened a door marked STAFF that led into a small suite of offices—three, it looked like, opening off an anteroom half full with boxes of stuff like seasoning mixes, take-out boxes and cups, and condiments stacked against the walls. "Last door on the right, sir," the guy said.</p><p>Hoping he was doing it right, Stan held out a five-dollar bill. "Thanks, Barry."</p><p>The kid made the bill vanish, smiled and nodded, then went back out to the dining room. Stan knocked on the door. It opened a sixteenth of an inch, then fully. "Hi, kid," the guy said. "Come on in."</p><p>Not until he got through the door did Stan recognize the doorman. "Lou," he said, surprised. "How's it hangin'?"</p><p>Lou said, "Ain't so bad as it looks," and Stan could believe that. It couldn't possibly be as bad as it looked if Lou was still walking around. Purple black eye, bandages on his bare arms, left arm in a sling, elastic bandage on his left elbow, stitches closing a cut on his forehead. He held himself stiffly, too, and Stan guessed that under his shirt his chest was tightly bandaged. He said, "Hey, I gotta thank you for stopping Razor from kickin' the crap out of me. Good job, kid."</p><p>"Leave us, Lou," said Pinter's voice. "Keep watch on the outer door, and stay sharp."</p><p>"Yeah, I will," Lou said, adjusting his jacket. Stan caught the momentary gleam of gunmetal, but gave no sign that he'd noticed. As he passed Stan, Stan saw his boss sitting behind a beat-up old desk with nothing on it but a big glass ashtray, empty of ashes or butts.</p><p>"First things first," Pinter said, holding out his hand. "The directions you wrote down." Stan handed them over, Pinter flicked a cigarette lighter, and they both watched the little sheet of paper burn and curl into a black ash.</p><p>Stan couldn't help staring at Pinter. The guy was probably thirty years old or thereabout, but he sat hunched like an old man and looked in nearly as bad shape as Lou—bruised face, a brownish-red ladder of stitches on a cheek cut, lips still grotesquely swollen at the left corner of his mouth. "Are you OK?" Stan asked.</p><p>Pinter shrugged. "Healin' up. It's slow. Hey, those two pishers who were whalin' on us, you know who sent them?"</p><p>"Who?"</p><p>"The goddam ABS. Association of Barnacle Scrapers! A phony-baloney union that screws the poor shlubs who work for them. We weren't even tryin' to organize them into our organization—but now we're gonna do it."</p><p>"Huh. Guess I'm lucky the beachcombers ain't organized," Stan said.</p><p>With a strained grin, as though he'd felt a twinge of pain, Pinter said, "Keep your options open, kid. Anybody follow you?"</p><p>Stan blinked at the unexpected question. "Uh—I don't think so."</p><p>Pinter winked his swollen left eye. "Be more suspicious, kid. Check every time. Trust nobody and you'll live longer. This time it's OK. Yeah, you were followed, but by one of my men, and no bad guys tailed him or you. We're OK here, we can talk easy. Nobody's gonna bug us or even overhear us by accident. Kind of a crummy place to meet, but that's one reason nobody would think to look here, see?</p><p>Stan glanced around. They were in a cubbyhole office, no window, just a desk and two chairs, cork board on the wall with some brochures and sticky notes hanging on it, a wall calendar from a funeral home, no pictures or anything personal. Fluorescent light made everything look forlorn and sterile. Pinter sat at the desk. Stan stood across from him and nodded. "Makes sense, I guess."</p><p>Pinter chuckled. "Sit, Stanny," he said. He held up his hand. "Wait. Don't even ask what you're dyin' to ask. I'll tell you. Early on the morning of the fifth, we took those mooks to the corporate building where the guys who hired them have their offices. We left 'em handcuffed to each other on the front steps, their arms through an iron railing too tough for 'em to bend or bust, too narrow for either of them to slip through. At three in the morning. We'd dosed 'em both with sleepy juice so they were unconscious and wouldn't wake up until nine, ten o'clock. We also took every stitch of clothes off them. Caused a little bit of a ruckus when drivers and pedestrians noticed them, I hear. Anyway, if the two of 'em disappear now, it ain't on us, kid. It's their bosses. Hey, go on. Sit, sit."</p><p>Stan finally did, but he was tense, sitting forward in the chair, wondering what he was going to hear next.</p><p>"OK," Pinter said, shifting so he leaned a little to the left. "I owe you a solid."</p><p>"No," Stan said. "You gave me a couple hundred."</p><p>Pinter laughed, a very short amused chuckle. "My life's worth more than that to me, Stanny. Let me tell you a few things. First: I thought it over, even called Philly and talked to my pop. Long story short, I'm not gonna take you on as one of my employees. See, Dad's old-fashioned and he insists that anybody kinda has to be born in the family to work for a guy who's in the stuff as deep as I am. I have to agree. I mean, I don't think that way, but he does, and a lot of the old guys agree with that. Anyhow, my dad wouldn't stand for me hiring you, but he says sure, I owe you, so I should help you out if I can. I'm sorry because you got muscle and I'm pretty sure you got smarts. You might go far, but no dice. So that gets rid of that, OK?"</p><p>Stan nodded.</p><p>Pinter shifted in his chair again, and Stan realized he was still in pain. "But I want to give you a hand. What are you thinkin' of as a line of work?"</p><p>"I saw this ad," Stan told him. He explained about sales and being your own boss. "Only the guys who own the shop where the ad is told me the man who's hiring is a crook. So I figured, I don't need to work for him, but I do need to learn how to sell stuff, then develop my own line of merchandise to sell. Does that make sense?"</p><p>"Could work," Pinter said. "You need a product. You need one people want. You need to be willing to start small, push your product with a certain amount of charm and salesmanship. Got to have a business plan, got to know how to price it out for profit, and so on dah dah dah. Tell you what, I'm gonna put you in touch with a guy here in town, name is Irving, very good at what he does. I ask him, he'll teach you the ins and outs of being an entrepreneur."</p><p>"I appreciate that," Stan said.</p><p>"Second," Pinter said as if Stan hadn't spoken, "I'll make you a business loan to get you started. But I won't hand you a satchel full of cash. Here's how it'll work: You spend a month shadowing Irving, study what he's got to teach you. Run your ideas for your sales line past him. When he thinks you got a shot, he'll tell me. Now, you're gonna start small. I'll give you a ten-thousand-dollar line of credit to give you that start, OK? You gotta provide receipts and all—legit receipts, don't try to get anything past me. Irving will give you a quick and dirty class in bookkeeping."</p><p>"I wouldn't cheat you," Stan said.</p><p>"Work out your plan with Irving, I'll back you, then try it out as a salesman. If you're satisfied, then we're square. If you ain't, we'll settle up whatever's outstanding on your balance and call it quit. You got one chance to prove yourself. If you're OK, good. If you're not, you'll have to try another line. You work off the debt by trying as hard as you can to learn the ropes. Irving can teach you to be a first-class salesman or a pretty sharp con artist. Not much difference. Your call. Either way, after this, you and I are done. We're all even. Remember, I get good reports on you, you don't even have to repay the loan. My people know how to write it off."</p><p>"No strings?" Stan asked.</p><p>Eddie Pinter laughed. "You mean, should you expect me to come around some dark night with a couple of stiffs in the trunk of my car, ask you to go with me into the barrens and dig a double grave? Nah, kid, never happen. Can I tell you something, just between you and me? Man to man?"</p><p>"I wouldn't shoot of my mouth about it," Stan said.</p><p>Eddie looked at his hands. He was making a chain of paper clips. Quietly, he said, "I told you my business is on the shady side. If you lived in Philly, you'd know my dad's name. He runs gambling, prostitution, some other rackets. OK, so I'm working to ease us out of that illegal crap. Ten years down the line, Dad will be retired. Twenty years, I think I can have the operation on a hundred per cent legitimate basis. Heck, we can even incorporate loan sharking, change our approach, and become an above-board mortgage and lending institution. That's my goal. Guess why."</p><p>"Because you're a straight-shooting guy and an upstanding citizen," Stanley said. "And besides, you can do without the headache of having both the cops and the other mobsters on your tail."</p><p>"You," Pinter said with a grin, "are a smart kid and a smart ass. I like you, Stanny. I'm not like my dad. From now on, you and me, we're unofficial distant cousins. To prove it, you can even call me by my kid nickname. You're Stanny, I'm Pinky. I don't let many people call me that. Mark of my respect for you—as unofficial family."</p><p>"Hey," Stan said, "one good thing about my Pop, he always drummed into me that family comes first. I believe in family, too."</p><p>Pinter's paper-clip chain had grown to about two feet long. He started to disassemble it. "Family comes first," he agreed. "Who knows, maybe in twenty years, if I can do what I want to do with the business, I may look you up. By then I hope to be able to hire anybody I want to, even distant cousins. But for here and now—this is so long, and good luck. But let me add this: You get in a real hole and there's no other way out, like you have trouble like them knuckleheads that were beatin' on me and Lou, give me a call." He stood up, and so did Stan. Leaning across the desk, Pinter shook his hand. "You shouldn't squeeze," he warned. "That bastard got me a lick across my fingers with the tire iron. You go have dinner in the restaurant. It's comped. Lou and me won't join you, we've got places to go. Thanks one more time, and good luck."</p><p>"You're welcome, and good luck to you. Uh—this Irving, how do I—"</p><p>"He'll call you," Pinter said. "Best time?"</p><p>"Between four and five, any afternoon," Stan said.</p><p>"Good enough. So long, kid. Take care of yourself." Pinter edged from behind the desk, gingerly, breathing hard. Stan winced. Pinter wasn't complaining, but from the way he held himself and moved, anybody could tell that the man really was in considerable pain.</p><p>As they left the office, Pinter took hold of Stan's left arm, above the elbow. It was like a friendly gesture, but Stan guessed Pinter could use a little extra support. As though he read Stan's mind, Pinter left him with a bit of advice: "You can't avoid hurtin', Stanny. The trick is not to show how much you hurt."</p>
<hr/><p>The gold chain turned out to be Spanish, probably from the late 1600s or early 1700s. It originally held some emblem of office and hung around the neck of a Spanish colonial official. It was 24 carat gold and weighed in at eight Troy ounces. Just for the gold in it, it would fetch $300 if melted down, but Vinnie knew a collector who bought it for nine hundred, and they split that, three to Vinnie for negotiating the sale, six to Stan as finder. Out of that Stan paid off the rest of his debt to his mother.</p><p>Irving Flors called Stan the next week. His office was downtown, up a narrow set of stairs and above a bank. Flors was almost a dwarf of a guy, maybe five foot two if that, bald and wrinkled. He looked a hundred years old but sounded like a young guy, and he arranged for Stan to come in for two hours every afternoon. Stan would learn theory from him and get a chance to practice applying it in practical situations.</p><p>"What are you selling?" Flors asked at the beginning of his second week.</p><p>"I dunno," Stan admitted. "I got no good ideas for product yet."</p><p>"Wrong answer," Flors said. He was always even-tempered, never raised his voice, never put any inflection on any statement. "Let's say you're selling widgets. Don't worry about what a widget is. It's some kinda gadget or gizmo. Sell me a widget."</p><p>Stan took a deep breath. "Sir, you need a widget. I got the best."</p><p>"Wrong, wrong, wrong." Flors said. "What are you selling?"</p><p>"Uh—widgets?"</p><p>"Wrong," Flors said again.</p><p>"But you said—"</p><p>Flors held up a finger for silence. "You don't remember anything else, Stanley, remember this. The product isn't gonna matter. The merch is nothing. Always, always, when you're selling, you're selling one thing. Think. What is it?"</p><p>Stan thought and finally gave up. "I dunno."</p><p>"I wish you'd come up with it yourself but let me tell you. You are selling—yourself. Selling yourself, Stan."</p><p>Oh. Ah! "You mean," Stan said, "uh, you mean, um, OK. If I sell myself, if I make everybody think I really believe in the thing I'm selling—"</p><p>"No," Flors said. "Not even that."</p><p>"If," Stan said slowly, "if I make myself friendly and upbeat and if I, like entertain the buyer—"</p><p>"You're getting there," Irving said. "Here's a thing: People can be rotten. But you can't despise a customer. You may think they're crooked or disgusting or meshuggeneh, whatever, but they're your audience. You make a guy smile, make a gal laugh, they're gonna buy what you're selling, because—" he raised his eyebrows.</p><p>"Because they're buying me," Stan said.</p><p>"Now," Irving said, "we can begin."</p>
<hr/><p>Through September, every day meant four to five hours of beachcombing, though with hardly anybody going to the beach to lose loose change or personal jewelry, the returns diminished. After that, a couple of hours with Irving, learning how to research potential products.</p><p>Buy low, sell high. If you can't manufacture a product on your own, and he couldn't afford to do that, then look for surplus goods of at least moderately acceptable quality. But not off the wall stuff. For instance, winter was coming on. Look around. Find some mom-and-pop type hardware store going out of business. See if they got a store of ice-melt stuff in bags. Offer to buy it off them at a quarter on the dollar, they'd probably go for that.</p><p>So the stuff normally sells for, say, five bucks a bag. You got a hundred you bought for twenty-five bucks. Offer them not for five bucks, but three bucks each. Sell them all, you get three hundred dollars. Subtract your cost, that's two hundred and seventy-five dollars of clear profit.</p><p>Pick the product to suit your target clientele. Stan started to catch on.</p><p>So six to eight hours of every day went to beachcombing and Irving's business school. Meanwhile, Carla was working in a mall clothing shop aimed at teens. It wasn't a demanding job, though it made her complain that her feet ached.</p><p>Still, three nights a week and on weekends, they went out. Movies sometimes, other times drives in the country, once even apple-picking. To Stan's surprise, that was fun. They had a lot of laughs. One Saturday afternoon early in the month, Stan took her to a horse race, but she wasn't really interested. On the other hand, anything he did with Carla was fun. And always, once or twice a week they'd hit the Juke Joint for burgers and dancing.</p><p>As September faded into October, though the evenings were starting to turn cool, Carla always showed up for a Juke Joint date in hot pants. The only thing that bothered Stan wore long blond hippie hair and bell-bottom pants, played an acoustic guitar, and sported a little brushy chin beard. Thistle Downe his name was, and he was a local singer and songwriter. His brand of music was what he called "Dimensional Healing." He strummed slow tunes with lyrics that bored Stanley out of his skull, stuff like</p>
<hr/><p>She walks on beams of sunshine,</p><p>She drifts on tides of gold,</p><p>Her kiss is like the new wine,</p><p>Her arms are never cold,</p><p>She is my Mother Nature,</p><p>My Earth Spirit she is, too—</p><p>No harsh years will ever date her—</p><p>Can't you guess? She's you.</p>
<hr/><p>It wasn't danceable, not like those great Fifties steps, the Twist and the Twitch, the Pony and the Slide. To Stan, Downe's music was way too soft, too draggy, too slow, his voice too light, like a baby's fart on a windy day.</p><p>However, Thistle Downe played the joint only every other week, on Friday nights. Sadly for Stan, Carla liked his voice and the tunes and thought they couldn't dance, she was happy to sit at the table and listen as the hippie guy strummed and sang.</p><p>October brought on county fairs and community festivals, spotted all around that part of the state. Not long before Halloween, Carla one afternoon asked Stanley, "Hey, could we drive up to Vernal Park on the thirtieth?"</p><p>"What's Vernal Park?" Stan asked. He was pretty familiar with Glass Shard Beach, he had been to Trenton a few times, and a couple times when he was younger, his dad had taken him and Ford into New York. However, once beyond a radius of about forty miles from Pines Pawns, his knowledge of geography was, um, sketchy.</p><p>"It's a recreation area, Stan! Ever hear of the Pine Hills Folk Festival?"</p><p>"No, can't say I have," Stan said.</p><p>"OK, it's outside of Titchener. There's like a county park, and there's a big display barn and all."</p><p>"Titchener?" Stan asked. "Where's that?"</p><p>She explained, and Stan grimaced. "That's like a hundred miles from here!"</p><p>"More like seventy-five," Carla said. "Come on, Stanley, I'd really like to go."</p><p>"What day of the week is the thirtieth?"</p><p>"Saturday. A week from tomorrow."</p><p>"How long do you want to stay?"</p><p>"All day," Carla said. "I'd like to get there about ten in the morning, stay until nine at night."</p><p>"We'd have to get you home by eleven-thirty," Stan said.</p><p>"I'll talk to Dad. He'll let us push it to midnight one time."</p><p>"Long drive," Stan said.</p><p>She gave him big puppy eyes. "Please?"</p><p>He laughed. "Aw, Carla, I couldn't say no to you. OK. So what do we do at this cockamamie festival?"</p><p>"It's like a great big county fair," Carla said. "Rides and games and all. And there's an amphitheater—"</p><p>"A what now?"</p><p>"An outdoor theater," Carla said. "They'll have bands and performers there. You gotta buy tickets to the rides, just like in a fair, but the shows are free. And there's food and all—you know, funnel cakes and hot dogs, country-fair food. It's up in the hills, real pretty country."</p><p>"OK, OK, I'm sold," Stan said. <em>If you can sell yourself, you'll sell your product. </em>Scrawny Irving was right. Boy, was he ever right.</p><p>The next evening, Saturday, October 23, they went to the Juke Joint, as usual. Not as usual, Thistle Downe was playing , so there on Saturday, not Friday, so there was no dancing. They ate, Thistle Downe took the small stage, and he said in his wispy voice, "Dig it, this is my new composition. It's inspired by transcendental meditation. I call it 'Let Go of your Mind.'"</p><p>"Aw," Stan said. "Let's cut out, Carla. This guy'll be going on for an hour."</p><p>"Be polite," she said.</p><p>Stan rolled his eyes and tried to sit still. Somehow Thistle was making his acoustic guitar sound like a sitar, doing a twangy, foreign-sounding number without words. It went on, like, forever, at least as far as he was concerned.</p><p>But Carla swayed and smiled as Thistle played. She looked like one of those cobras in a movie set in India, the one that rises up and weaves from side to side as a—what did you call those guys?—a fakir played a droning flute and charmed the deadly serpent.</p><p>At last the tune, if you could call it that, wound up and Carla and some others applauded. "Thank you!" Thistle said, as if the joint had gone nuts for his weirdo music. "I have another new song that I think you'll like. It's like a love song, dig it, and it's called 'You're My Nirvana.' Hey, could I ask a lovely lady to come up on stage so I could sing it to her? How about—" he gazed around the room—"you."</p><p>"OK!" Carla said, getting up before Stan could stop her. He sat boiling as she stood there in her purple hot pants and deep pink top while he leaned toward her, strummed his guitar, and crooned:</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>I see the light of enchanted skies</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When I look into your mystic eyes,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I roam through distant galaxies,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When you whisper, "Love me, please,"</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The mundane world just fades away</em>
</p><p>
  <em>When I hear my lover say,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"Baby, you've shown me the way,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>You are my Nirvana."</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>There was more, lines Stan didn't understand, about the girl being his Helen, his Venus, his Calypso. It was a long song. As soon as Carla came giggling back to the table, Stan stood up and took her hand. "Come on, let's go. I'm not feeling too good."</p><p>She didn't object, and at the door of her house, she kissed him goodnight, but then she murmured, "I wish you wouldn't be like that."</p><p>"Just got a bad burger or something," he muttered. Really, though, his belly ached because he thought Thistle had hypnotized Carla with his music, or charmed her, or something. He didn't like the idea.</p><p>That night he had a bad dream. Carla was onstage with Thistle Downe again, but her hot pants magically turned to bell-bottoms, and she hugged the jerk and somehow they blasted off, soaring up through the ceiling of the Juke Joint, trailing colored streaks like a rainbow.</p><p>Stan woke himself up shouting "No!"</p><p>Then he assured himself, "It was a dream. Just a dream. Nothin' to it."</p><p>Still, the scene lingered with him, more vivid than reality, with all the intensity of a hallucination.</p><p>All that next week he mended fences with Carla. He bought her a pendant she admired and sat with her and her dad when she explained about the folk festival and how she wanted to go, only they might be a little bit late in leaving, so could she please have an extra hour on her curfew, Daddy?</p><p>"I've never brought her home late before," Stanley pointed out.</p><p>Mr. McCorkle said, "This one time, all right. But only this one time."</p><p>Carla hugged him and told him he was the best dad ever. Stan took a hundred bucks in cash from his savings—leaving enough for rent, food, and gas money, but hardly anything over, because pickings had been slim—and told Carla, up front, that was what they had to spend at the festival.</p><p>The thirtieth was a cold day, and they drove west toward the hills with the heater on. Carla was in jeans and sweater, and they'd both brought jackets. Though sunny, the day was supposed to touch the high temperature a couple hours past noon, and then it would be only fifty-five in Titchener.</p><p>After more than an hour of driving, the last part on twisting roads through pine forests, passing little villages, farms, golf courses, lakes, and like that, Stan drove through the small town of Titchener. It looked like the sort of burg where everyone lived by selling antiques to everyone else. Quaint brick stores, crowds of out-of-town cars, a big yellow banner hanging across the main drag: PINE HILLS FOLK FESTIVAL. Temporary signs pointed the way to Vernal Park, to the north of town.</p><p>It was slow going—a two-lane road, up and down hills, then a long curve along the top of a steep ravine. Off to the right, a rocky, boulder-strewn slope plunged down a hundred feet to a narrow stream bed, but they glimpsed a pretty little waterfall down there, too.</p><p>Then the road topped a ridge and curved away to the left, and in a minute or so, they saw the tents and permanent buildings of the festival ahead. Beyond them were the county-fair rides. Parking was in a huge graveled lot, with teenagers in jackets waving them in and stacking the cars like wieners on a grill, long straight lines. As they drove onto the lot, an older guy collected five bucks for parking. Signs said to lock their vehicle and park at their own risk.</p><p>"Gonna be dark when we come back," Stan said. "I don't see any lights in this lot. Remember where we park."</p><p>It was nearly at the far end of Row AA. They got out, put on their jackets—up in the hills here, it was breezy and very cool—and Stan even dug out his winter gloves, kept against all logic in the glove box of his car. He figured if he didn't need them, Carla might.</p><p>And it was an OK day. For nearly all of it. They looked at the farm exhibits, the fat pigs, the prize milk cows, the biggest pumpkin, so on and so on. They rode rides. Carla played some games. Stan tried his hand at the shooting gallery and was a miserable failure as a crack shot. The dunk tank was out, but closed—too cool for it, they figured. They browsed the handicrafts, laughed at little kids getting their faces painted, and so on.</p><p>The chill really came, though, at the top of the Ferris wheel, when Stan looked down and saw in the front row of the parking area a turquoise van with a name stenciled on the door that even at that distance he could make out.</p><p>
  <em>Thistle Downe. Transcendental Healing.</em>
</p><p>When the ride stopped, Stan said, "Carla, tell me the truth. Did you wanna come to this thing because he's here?"</p><p>"Who?" she asked, for the first time sounding fake.</p><p>"You know," he said.</p><p>She sighed. "I knew you wouldn't want to come if you knew Thistle would be here," she said. "But he asked me if I could catch his whole show here, and I said yes."</p><p>"When was this?"</p><p>"I went back to the Juke Joint after you dropped me off last week. To tell him thanks for letting me come up and singing to him."</p><p>"You went without me."</p><p>"I just like his music."</p><p>"You shoulda told me," Stan said.</p><p>Words led to words. She found Thistle Down. Stan balled his fists—but no, punching the jerk out wouldn't make Carla any happier.</p><p>In the end, Thistle said, "I'll take you home, Carla, after the gig. Your friend here doesn't have to stay."</p><p>"Fine," she said. "There's a pay phone at the exhibit hall. I'll call Dad and let him know."</p><p>"Fine," Stan said.</p><p>He walked back to the car alone. That was late in the day, sun already down. Night was coming on, and Thistle's gig began at eight. Park at your own risk. There was no guard on duty—nobody in the parking lot at all, for that matter. No lights, either. Music was coming from the amphitheater, not Thistle yet, but some country-sounding stuff.</p><p>Stanley later heard that Carla got into big trouble with her dad when she didn't get home. She explained that someone had hotwired and stolen Thistle's van and had wrecked it half a mile from the park, driving it off the road in the one short gap where there was no guardrail and down into the ravine. Whoever it was must have survived, though the van was totaled, because nobody was in the wreck and the cops didn't find a dead or injured person anywhere. They figured it was some kids who'd busted in, because all of Thistle's beer had evidently been drunk—all twenty-odd bottles were empty, anyhow, and the ruined van reeked of brew. The smash-up had stopped the dashboard clock at 8:31, halfway through Thistle's act. The cops couldn't find fingerprints.</p><p>Stanley got home at about the same time that evening, knocked on Mrs. Dewey's door, and when she answered, he asked, "I was wonderin', did you happen to hear my phone ring while I've been away?"</p><p>"No," she said. "I can always hear it, it's so quiet up here. Nobody called." She looked closely at him. "What's wrong? Why are you so sad?"</p><p>"Had a little bad news," he said, forcing a smile. "Well—goodnight, Mrs. Dewey."</p><p>"Goodnight, Stanley."</p><p>Down in his apartment, Stan just sat for a couple of hours on the edge of his bed, feeling sorry for himself. Close to eleven, Mr. McCorkle called him to ask what had happened. "I'm sorry, sir," Stan said. "There's this musician she likes, and they arranged to meet up there. I didn't know about it. He's gonna drive her home."</p><p>After a pause, Mr. McCorkle asked, "Things bad between you two?"</p><p>"I think they're over, sir," Stan said.</p><p>It was past midnight when he drank the first full bottle of beer he'd ever had. Just the one. Not gonna be like Pop. He didn't sleep at all.</p><p>The next morning just after sunup, Halloween it was, Carla phoned, sounding furious. "What did you do?" she demanded.</p><p>Stan asked, "Huh? What did I do? I didn't do anything!"</p><p>"When you left last night, what did you do?"</p><p>"I went to my car and drove home!" he said. "Why? What did you think I did?"</p><p>"What time did you get back to your place, Stanley?"</p><p>"'Bout eight-thirty. I left the festival before seven, but didn't drive fast, 'cause I was feeling kinda down, for some reason."</p><p>"Can you prove that?"</p><p>"Carla, of course I was feeling down—"</p><p>"No, can you prove when you got home?"</p><p>"Uh, I don't think I got any way to—wait, I did talk to my landlady when I first rolled in. She can tell you what time it was, I guess. You can check with her. Why?"</p><p>For an agonizing long time—a few seconds—Carla said nothing. Then, audibly weeping, she said, "Goodbye, Stanley."</p><p>Later that morning, he went upstairs to see Mrs. Dewey and gave her his two weeks' notice. He said he'd get his forwarding address to her later.</p>
<hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Contrary Winds</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>(1971-1982)</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>5: Contrary Winds</strong>
</p><p>(November 1971-summer 1972)</p><p>Rochester County was an inland area. Stanley had never slept so far away from the ocean. What did he know from orchards, farms, and cows?</p><p>But here he'd eventually wound up after leaving Glass Shard Beach. He made no overall plan, but followed chance and fortune. Sadly, fortune had him whipped for speed and sped further out of sight. He had moved first from Mrs. Dewey's house—she returned his deposit and refused to charge him for the week in November that he'd stayed while getting ready to move on.</p><p>He sold his metal detector, getting forty dollars for it. He wandered around, and scouted possibilities. By mere chance, midway through November he walked into an Army Surplus Store in Claynton, a town about twenty miles from Glass Shard Beach. He didn't see anything he really needed, but way in the back was the Make An Offer room. Odds and ends of junk strewed the place, faded khakis, threadbare on creases where they had been folded for years, and cases of expired ration tins, some dating back to WWII, and some boxes. A big cardboard box sat atop a wood crate. The box had been opened and then the top refolded shut again, but not sealed.</p><p>Stanley, on the verge of returning to the car—it was a cold, snowy day, and the cavernous Quonset hut store had inadequate heating—found himself curious and idly tugged a flap of the cardboard box loose and peered in at a mass of fabric. He pulled one out. It was a gray, soft fabric square, about fourteen inches on a side. Faintly stamped in one corner in light blue ink was the label <em>Rayon/polypropelene blend test batch 154 7/68</em>. Stan took it up front, to the guy in a leather bomber jacket behind the register, who stood there sucking on a cigar to warm himself. "What's this?" he asked.</p><p>The guy took it and chewed his cigar, as if his brains were in it and he was trying to squeeze out a thought. "Cleanin' cloth. Got it years ago when a cloth mill went bust. Got a box of six gross back there, take 'em all for ten bucks."</p><p>"What's in the crate underneath them?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Dunno. Surprise package. What's it say?"</p><p>"Burned into the top's the words <em>Fort Sam Houston 1CB."</em></p><p>"Aw, that's hardware junk from the US Cavalry. That box goes back to like World War I. Dunno what's in it, probably chains and junk. Take that for another ten bucks."</p><p>"Both for ten," Stan offered.</p><p>The guy exhaled a puff of smoke in Stan's face as a form of turning down the offer. "Nah, can't do it."</p><p>"How about both for twelve? Come on, it's been here forever, and who else is gonna buy a box of nasty-lookin' cleanin' cloths when paper towels are cheap?"</p><p>"Make it fifteen," the guy said. Stan nodded. "OK. Get 'em the hell out before I change my mind."</p><p>Stan gave him three five-dollar bills, and he gave Stan a cloud of acrid cigar smoke in lieu of change. When Stan got the containers back to Mrs. Dewey's—it was just three days before Stan was planning to move out, with no destination in mind—he took a pry bar and opened the wood crate in the garage.</p><p>It contained 144 three-tined pitchfork heads, manufactured by the Bodaine Tool Company in 1918, according to stamped letters and figures in the socket sheaths.</p><p>Great.</p><p>But Stan stored the cloths and the pitchfork tines in the trunk of the car. When he drove away three days later, waving goodbye to Mrs. Dewey, he just drove away from Glass Shard Beach. He hit the Garden State Parkway. He could go north, maybe even to New York. He could turn west, maybe as far as Philadelphia. When he hit heavy northbound traffic, That made the decision easier, and he pulled off at the next exit and took the only direction possible, west.</p><p>OK, he was heading west.</p><p>A few hours later, he was cruising through farm company. At one point, he drove past a pasture with a—what did you call it? Flock? No, herd. Herd of white and black cows. Stan didn't know much about farming or farm animals, but—didn't they use pitchforks to, like, feed cows? Yeah, they were for pitching hay. That's probably why the Army had used them back in the day, back when there were soldiers on horseback, and presumably, horses to provide the backs.</p><p>So . . . that was back then, when they fed horses, and this was now, when farmers in these parts raised cows. And had to feed them.</p><p>And maybe the farmers had to clean up things, too. Polish them. And he had those cloths.</p><p>Stan started to look for a motel. Preferably an extremely cheap one.</p>
<hr/><p>Rendell was a town of a couple thousand people. It did boast an inexpensive, though relatively clean, motel. The small, cramped rooms even came with a TV and an in-room phone. True, the TV received only three channels, one of them WNZJ, "The Voice of the Garden State's Gardenlands."</p><p>Farming was the thing in Rendell. The biggest store in the little burg was the Seed &amp; Feed. The second-largest one was Jeans &amp; Boots Outlet. After a couple of days of doping out the situation, Stan called Irving. "Hey, I'm gonna need to draw on my investment fund, OK?"</p><p>"How much?" Irving asked.</p><p>"Five hundred?"</p><p>"Are you asking me?"</p><p>"Nah, it's my money. Five hundred. For investing in inventory and maybe buyin' some advertising time when I'm ready. And money to live on until then."</p><p>"You need cash?"</p><p>"Uh—could you like put it in the bank for me? There's a branch here of the one I use."</p><p>"Give me the numbers."</p><p>And bingo, the next morning his bank balance had quadrupled. Stan immediately found a place to buy wholesale broom handles. They were kind of thin for what he needed, but he slapped some glue in and before the day was out, he had manufactured fifty pitchforks. He went to a stationery store and had a rubber stamp made up and bought a pad with permanent black ink.</p><p>He stamped each pitchfork handle just above the socket: STANCO.</p><p>Christmas passed, and New Year's. Stan didn't even call home. Holidays were bad days for someone like his dad, who celebrated with a bottle.</p><p>In early January, Stan arranged with the TV station to make his first infomercial. Well, that was an exaggeration. The spots were only fifteen seconds long, and they aired not in prime time, but just before. A hundred bucks bought him twenty runs of the spot. An additional twenty-five paid for a cameraman to shoot and edit it.</p><p>And this is the way it went:</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>(Stan, dressed in overalls, a straw hat, and with a bandana around his neck, is holding out a handful of straw to a puppet head of a cow, which turns away from the food.)</em>
</p><p>STAN'S VOICE-OVER: Farmer friends, are you sick of feeding your cows like this?</p><p>STAN/FARMER: Yes!</p><p>STAN'S VOICE-OVER: Then try a Stanco Feeding Fork, with our patented swivel action!</p><p>
  <em>(STAN/FARMER tosses a bunch of hay with a pitchfork)</em>
</p><p>STAN/FARMER: This is super easy! And Bossy likes it too!</p><p>
  <em>(Close-up of puppet cow head "eating" the hay. Stan's voice on the soundtrack changes pitch and imitates a cow: Moo, moo, nom nom nom!)</em>
</p><p>STAN'S VOICE-OVER: The Stanco Feeding Fork, not a hundred dollars, not fifty dollars, not even twenty dollars, but just five dollars! Call the number on the screen for your Stanco Feeding Fork now! Operators are standing by!</p>
<hr/><p>In a week, Stan sold thirty of them. Each day he arranged to drive out for a personal delivery, and each time he said, "Hey, ya know what? My boss says I got to slap on a two-buck delivery fee, but if you'll recommend somebody else that could use one of these babies, I'll waive that!"</p><p>So each customer put him on the trail of one, maybe two others. Soon his route was spiraling him far afield from the cheap motel. Sales went well, and each five-buck sale netted him a $3.70 profit. And whenever on a sales call Stan saw something that needed a minor repair, he cheerfully did it for free and gratis.</p><p>Gate latch busted? Fifteen minutes with a screwdriver and pliers made it good as new. Front-door light out? Stan was tall enough to install a lightbulb. Little stuff. And often as not, he'd get invited to dinner or at least sent on his way with a sandwich of leftover roast beef. His food budget dropped down as far as his socks.</p><p>In the evenings, when not on the road, Stanley experimented with the cleaning cloths. They were absorbent—almost like a baby diaper, one of the cloths just sucked up water. Even something like ink—it worked pretty good. But, big drawback, it didn't last long. Three, four uses and the cloths began to get so weak that the next time you tried, they usually sort of melted.</p><p>There was that pesky stamp, too. Each cloth identified itself as part of a test batch, and over a decade old, at that.</p><p>But, Stan thought, if he dyed them the same color as the stamp . . . he went hunting for the cheapest dye he could find. Coloring the things was a major pain—and though he'd bought a big plastic basin, the inevitable spatters in the motel bathtub probably would hang around forever like a permanent case of purple measles. He had to make another purchase, a couple of rubber mats for the tub, not to prevent slips, but to hide the stains from the maid who usually cleaned every other day.</p><p>In late January, Stan had six dozen dyed chamois cloths. He'd seen enough commercials for schlock—"as seen on TV" to plan out another TV ad. Packaging was a bit of a problem, but that could be solved with business cards, a stapler, and a trip to the Copy Cat, a store that specialized in photocopies. He discovered that color printing would be prohibitively expensive, so he economized, buying a used portable typewriter in good shape except the key for Q was missing. He spent some days brainstorming a brand name.</p><p>"Dr. Clean" he liked, but there was a kitchen cleanser product featuring a Clean, though one who had not gone to grad school. "Mop-It" was pretty cool, but Jim Henson just might sue. "Stanco Chamois" was to the point, but who knew what a chamois was? Anyhow, he wasn't sure he could spell it. "Stanco Shammy" solved that problem, but seemed too mundane, too ordinary.</p><p>"The Shammy Total" was almost there, but a little bit long for the card size he had. So . . . shorten it? "SHAM TOTAL." Oh, yeah, baby, we're there!</p><p>Stan wrote out the copy, edited it, corrected it, and wound up with this:</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>The SHAM TOTAL is the ultimate absorbent clean-up pad. It soaks up two hundred times its weight in water! To use, just dampen and then apply to any spill or stain. With vigorous rubbing, it cleans everything! A Stanco product.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>That went on the front of each card, in typed letters. He had the Copy Cat shop print up a couple gross. Then he sat at the tiny little desk in the run-down motel room and used another rubber stamp and red stamp ink to impress the name of the product, SHAM TOTAL, on the other side of every card. And then he stapled a card in the corner of two hundred dyed clean-up cloths.</p><p>This time around, he wrote and rehearsed his TV ad more carefully. He had to record several takes, solving a major problem. When he realized that they could film the scenes of the ad—it was to be a thirty-second epic—Stan filmed the second part first, showing his pale blue shirt and even his face pristine and clean to prove that the Sham Total could indeed absorb every drop of dark purplish-red cranberry juice, even removing the color so no stain was left. Then he filmed the <em>first </em>part: "Hi, I'm Stan Pines of Stanco Enterprises. Are you sick of this always happening to you?" A secretary conscripted in as a stagehand threw a pitcher of cranberry juice in his face. Unfortunately, she followed instructions to the letter and threw the pitcher along with the juice. Stan grinned through the pain, spreading his arms to show he and his shirt had become an incredible mess.</p><p>He had to throw the shirt away—nothing could get that out. And his face and neck felt sticky after three successive showers. Still, the TV guy combined the two scenes, so to the viewer it looked as though Stan simply swabbed up the juice with one Sham Total. By then he'd rented a P.O. box and took orders for the Sham Total by mail. He also set up a table at the Mount Blount Flea Market not far from Rendell, though Mount Blount was a smaller and even more rural community.</p><p>But the Flea Market was open Thursday through Saturday, three days every week, and for fifteen bucks, Stan could rent a table there to pitch his pitchforks and push his Sham Totals. Folks who'd seen his TV ads wanted him to pose with them for photos, and everybody who stopped to look ended up buying. After just two weeks of this, and counting the phone and mail orders, Stan had recouped his five-hundred-dollar initial investment, plus about fifty more on top.</p><p>Sweet. He figured he was on the way to success. When sales tailed off, he hit the road, with videotape copies of his two commercials. In a series of small towns, he ran the commercials in late-night time slots on the cheapest TV stations. Two weeks and he'd blow town and head for new spot.</p><p>By June, he'd spiraled all the way through Jersey and wound up right back home in Glass Shard Beach for a two-week stand. His overhead was low, but the sales—while substantial—weren't through the roof. He picked up a moderate profit, but to tell the truth, he'd earned more from beachcombing, even in the bad stretches, when the only things he found were rusted cans and pull-tabs and bottle caps from beer containers.</p><p>He took a room in the same dingy motel where he'd first started out. It was lonely. On his third night in town, despite his resolve, he broke down and called Carla.</p><p>Her mom answered, and Stan asked for her.</p><p>Mrs. McCorkle asked, "Stanley? We heard you'd left town. Didn't you hear?"</p><p>"Hear what?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Carla's gone, dear. She eloped in February with that musician boy. We haven't heard from her in two months. They're touring with his music, but we don't know where."</p><p>Stan went silent.</p><p>After a few moments, Mrs. McCorkle said apologetically, "Her father had a falling out with Carla. I'm sorry, Stanley. Stanley? Are you there?"</p><p>Stan hung up the pay phone. The next day he arranged to set up a booth on the pier to sell his products. That was something to do. Because the ads had been running for a week, the first day kept him busy, taking people's cash and selling his merch. He was calling the pitchforks "Garden turners" now, since there weren't all that many farms in this part of the state. But he sold dozens of the Sham Totals. It was his best sales day so far.</p><p>But in two days the angry calls started to come in. The Sham Total didn't work as advertised. True, it would clean up water, but it only made stains worse. Much worse. Much bluer, for one thing—the cheapest dye money could buy turned out not to be colorfast. On the last Thursday in May, Stan showed up at the booth to man his table—</p><p>The angry mob almost got him. They'd come armed—fortunately with Stanco pitchforks. When they shook the implements at him, the heads all fell off, leaving a lot of red-faced, blue-handed customers staring numbly at the useless pitchforks and the wads of soggy fiber that until their third use had been Sham Totals.</p><p>Fortunately, Stan had parked his car just outside the venue and reached it in time. Unfortunately, he left his remaining stock of cleaning cloths and pitchfork heads back in the motel room.</p><p>The thought irritated him enough to make him yell, "Suckers!" derisively as he burned rubber.</p><p>He didn't stop burning it until he was out of the county, and in fact out of the state. He barreled west across the border into Pennsylvania.</p><p>Through completely non-suspicious channels, he learned that there was a warrant out in Jersey for Stanley Pines. He holed up for a couple weeks, creating a bogus Pennsylvania state ID for himself in the name of Steve Pinington. To make the change more convincing, he grew a pretty impressive mustache. On the one hand, it helped to disguise him. On the other, it made him look like his dad, which gave him a shock anytime he glimpsed himself in a mirror.</p><p>Stanley repeated his pattern: He checked into a low, low-budget motel in a bad area of Philly, became miserly with his meager possessions—he had made some profit before being chased out of New Jersey, but he had lost most of his clothes and almost all of his merchandise inventory because he didn't dare haul through the Glass Shard Beach motel to pick up his junk. As a result, he had to hit the outlet stores and Goodwill to rebuild a wardrobe.</p><p>So OK, the duds weren't fashionable, and they weren't the kind of threads Stan would have bought by choice, but they worked. True, his replacement clothes were on the gaudy side—Stan didn't present himself very imposingly in a lavender shirt and a vivid red suit—but then they helped to distinguish his new persona from the old Stanley Pines.</p><p>Once more he cast around for a product to sell. This time he managed to get a connection to an associate of Eddie Pinter—the only name he got for the guy was "Call me Slugs." Slugs said he had some junky stuff he couldn't dispose of for love, money, or extortion, but thanks to a good word from Eddie—or maybe Irving, Stan's only point of contact now—he gave Stan a huge case of bandages.</p><p>"These didn't pass the inspection," he said. They were in plain white boxes, twenty bandages to a box, about five hundred boxes in the case.</p><p>"Who made 'em?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Who knows? Bunch of prisoners in a Colombian prison turned 'em out. But the prison system there refused to use them in their infirmary. Whatever. You want 'em, you take 'em."</p><p>This time around Stan had a copier store print up hundreds of sticky-backed labels the right size to cover the front of one of the boxes: STANCO BANDAGES. And because he was stuck for a slogan, Stan had the printer add "Guaranteed! It won't give you rashes!"</p><p>And once more, Stan made a low-rent late-night TV ad for the product stressing "It won't give you rashes!"</p><p>However, he had not tested the stickum. And as it turned out, the bandages gave <em>everybody </em>rashes. This time when the mob came for him, they had more fearsome weapons than pitchforks.</p><p>These guys came with <em>lawyers.</em></p><p>Still, Stan had lots of the bandages left, and he swung through Massachusetts, through upstate New York, through New Hampshire, and into Maine. He paused at each stop for a time sufficient to unload enough of the bandages to make a small profit. In Maine he almost got trapped. In the end, he had to drive at high speed across the state, barely eluding the state police as he sped past Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (fortunately the signpost for the lake was large enough to hide his car). As a precaution, Stan hit an unguarded junkyard and borrowed enough license plates to have a different one for each of the next four states he passed through.</p><p>He stayed out of trouble in Ohio, though someone there recognized him, and he had to make another midnight run.</p><p>In Kentucky he just lay low. As he drove out for fast food one evening, though, he changed his luck at least marginally for the better. He tried the flip-you-double-or-nothing routine with the cashier in the burger joint, but she declined. Stan paid full price, and when he sat at one of the plastic tables to eat his fries and small hamburger a stranger surprised him: "Mind if I sit here?"</p><p>Stan looked up. It was a guy with prematurely gray hair and a full beard. "It's a free country," he said.</p><p>"That it is." The guy sat down and said, "Son, you're down on your luck, ain't you?"</p><p>"What, you been reading my mail?" Stan asked.</p><p>"No, I saw the hustle you tried to pull back there. Coin switch?"</p><p>"Sometimes it works," Stan said.</p><p>"Until it doesn't. Scam me, kid. Let me see your moves."</p><p>"Not in the mood," Stan said.</p><p>"Try it. I might put you onto something that can bring in some dough."</p><p>Sighing, Stan said, "OK, you bet me a quarter on a coin flip. Here's my coin. Check both sides, make sure it's legitimate. You flip it, call it, I'll cover it."</p><p>"Heads," the guy sad as he flipped the quarter. When it clattered to the table, Stan slapped it down with his left hand.</p><p>"You said heads?" he asked.</p><p>The guy nodded.</p><p>"Heads. You don't want to change?"</p><p>"Nope."</p><p>Stan took his hand off the coin. "Sorry," he said. "Tails." Then he picked up the quarter between thumb and forefinger and turned it to reveal that it was tails on both sides.</p><p>"And," the guy said, "if I'd called tails?"</p><p>Stan slapped his right hand down, then moved it to reveal a double-headed quarter.</p><p>"Pretty slick," the guy said. "I thought you were palming a coin, but I didn't see the switcheroo."</p><p>"The legit quarter stuck to the heel of my hand, and I dropped it in my lap," Stan explained. "There's other ways of swapping coins out, too, but that's one."</p><p>The guy leaned to the side, took a quarter out of his pocketed loose change, and said, "You win. Catch." He flipped it with his thumb, and Stan snatched out of mid-air—</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>He laughed. "You're pretty slick, yourself. I coulda sworn I saw it in the air."</p><p>"People see what they expect to see," the guy said. "What's your name, kid?"</p><p>"Lately it's been Steve Pinington, Stew Pinkerton, Sean Pickles. But you can call me Stan. What do I call you?"</p><p>"Windy, people call me. My straight handle is Aeolus Vento. My old man named all us kids after Greek gods. Zephyr's my oldest sister, Boreas is my older brother. Me, I got stuck with Aeolus."</p><p>"Huh," Stan said. "Me and my two brothers all have the same middle name—Filbrick. After our dad."</p><p>"You done there?"</p><p>Stan took the last rattling sip from his cup, then wadded up the wrappers. "Yeah, I'm good."</p><p>"I got some guys to meet," Windy said. "We're meeting at one of them's place for a little friendly card game. You go with me, we'll make some money. I'll give you a quarter share of the winnings."</p><p>"Only a quarter?"</p><p>"Yeah, 'cause you're gonna be the shill. I'm the mechanic. I'll do the hard work."</p><p>"Wait, what are you gettin' me into?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Little poker game, that's all. Work with me for a while, kid. I'll teach you a few things that will help out. One in particular."</p><p>"What's that?" Stan asked.</p><p>"How to gamble and win."</p><p>
  <em>Huh, Stan thought. Maybe the wind of fate's blowing in the right direction for a change.</em>
</p>
<hr/>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. The Herd of the Sun</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1971-1982)</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>6: The Herd of the Sun</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(April-May 1972)</em>
</p><p>"Watch again," Windy Vento said. He cut the deck, he shuffled the deck, he shoved it over. "Cut again."</p><p>They were sitting in Vento's hotel room—several notches above any motel room that Stanley could afford. It even had a round table with a couple of fairly comfortable chairs. Vento sat with his back to the wall, Stan opposite him, with his back to the TV. Vento shoved he deck across, Stan picked it up and cut it not quite evenly, and stacked it again. Windy Vento picked it up but just set it on the table in front of him and then didn't touch it again. "Write down the name of a card," he said.</p><p>The poker game, to be held in yet another room in yet another hotel, was coming up in a couple of hours. Stan picked up a sheet of the hotel stationery and a ballpoint. Looking inquisitively at Vento, he asked, "OK, just write down any card?"</p><p>"Yeah, don't let me see."</p><p>Stan thought for a minute, curled his arm around the sheet of paper to shield it from Vento's view, and then wrote down <em>5 hearts</em>. "Got it done."</p><p>"Turn the paper face-down on the table," Vento said. "When you turn it face-down, be careful that I don't see what you wrote."</p><p>Stan did as Vento told him.</p><p>The gambler nodded as if satisfied. "OK, here you go." Vento drew the top card, then put it face-down on the sheet of paper. "Go ahead, look."</p><p>Stan turned over the card. It was the five of hearts. "Huh!"</p><p>Vento smiled. "Show me your prediction."</p><p>Stan slowly turned the sheet of paper over. "You were close," he said. His paper now read <em>8 hearts.</em></p><p>"Not too bad, kid," Vento said, chuckling. "Two things, though—you don't turn a five into an eight with one diagonal mark. Looks too suspicious that way. You have to add curved lines, like adding a letter S to overlap the five. Takes practice. Did you see what I did? How'd I know which card you wrote down?"</p><p>"I dunno," Stan told him. "I think maybe you read the way the pen moved when I wrote down the card."</p><p>"Right so far," Vento said. "You watch somebody write, either with a pen, chalk, whatever, you can see what they're writing if you follow the motions. Takes a lot of patience to learn, but it can be done. So from that I knew it was the five of hearts, right?"</p><p>"I guess," Stan said.</p><p>"It's called pencil reading. A good operator can make dough with it—being a fake psychic, for example."</p><p>"I'll bet my mom knows something about that," Stan said. "She's a phone psychic. Also a phony psychic."</p><p>"They have their own bag of tricks," Vento said. "Know what billet reading is?"</p><p>Stan shook his head.</p><p>"It's having a bunch of people write stuff on pieces of paper, folding them, and then the operator reads the folded or sealed messages. I can teach you an easy method. It's called the one-ahead. But right now, second big point, the card, tell me— how did it get to the top of the deck?"</p><p>Stan squinted thoughtfully. "I got an idea, maybe. Can I look at the deck?"</p><p>Vento folded his arms across his chest. "Normally I wouldn't let the mark do that, but yeah, go ahead."</p><p>Stan turned the deck over and laid the cards out in a row, so the faces showed. In the bottom third of the deck lay the five of hearts. Above the line, still on top of the sheet of paper a few inches away lay a second five of hearts.</p><p>""You pulled a switch," Stan said slowly. "Let me think how you could do that. OK, You have two identical decks. One you play with. The other, you, um—ahead of time, you divide up by suits, each suit runnin' ace to king, in order. You, uh—you put a rubber band around each suit. You know where in your pockets each suit is. Once you do the pencil reading, after you know what the card is, before the mark looks up, you run your thumbnail over the edge of the cards in the hearts bundle, stop at five, and pull the card out and palm it. Then—"</p><p>"Yeah, that's enough. You got it," Vento said with a broad smile.</p><p>"I didn't <em>see</em> it, though," Stanley said. "And I watched close."</p><p>"All right," Vento said. "Let's think about that. You didn't see because you didn't know what you were looking for, and you had that little pen point under your thumbnail to worry about already, and you were thinking about how to turn the paper over and change the five into an eight. So you didn't notice my moves. But you wouldn't have, anyhow, because I'm good."</p><p>"Is that how you're gonna play poker?"</p><p>Vento laughed again. "Not hardly. You and me are gonna run a game on some guys who don't play honest poker, just to teach them a lesson. And also to build up our bankrolls. I'm gonna want to pull in somewhere around three thousand, minimum, for something else I'm planning. Whatever we rake in, you get a quarter of it."</p><p>"So what's my role tonight?" Stan asked.</p><p>Vento picked up the deck, leaving the extra five of hearts, and shuffled it several times. "You do know how to play poker?"</p><p>Stan shrugged. "Yeah, like stud and hold 'em. I never played for more than pennies, but I can get through a game, I know that much."</p><p>"I'll do the work. You just play. You're going to be a young guy hot for a big game. You work in the hotel where it's going down. When I stopped at the desk, you tailed me to the room and then said you wanted in, or else you'd bust us."</p><p>"Won't they kick me out?"</p><p>"No, six makes a better game than five, and the other guy who was gonna come with me couldn't make it on account of coming down with a bad case of being imaginary to begin with. These guys will be glad to have you play when they see you got a roll of a couple thousand bucks. They'll want to take that from you Don't bet a lot. It's OK to win and lose a few small pots. But if the pot gets above a hundred, you fold. Don't matter what a great hand you got, you fold."</p><p>"Got it."</p><p>Vento dealt out five poker hands, face-down. "Time comes, I'm dealing, like this, and two of the guys are gonna have good hands. Check the two closest to you there."</p><p>One hand had three Jacks. The other one was a low flush in diamonds, deuce, five, six, seven, nine. "I see," Stan said.</p><p>"You look nervous but hang in as the betting starts. I'll build the pot up to at least five thousand. I'll drag out the turn until one of the marks says, 'Come on, bet or fold.' That's your cue. Then I'll say, 'Crap, I'm out,' and fold. The two guys are gonna keep raising each other, because they're sure they're gonna beat you. You sweat and squirm a lot and act like you're scared out of your head, but hang in. Keep up with 'em. See the bet, don't raise. I know one of the guys will call sometime between a pot of five thousand and nine thousand."</p><p>"You sure?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Oh, yeah. The showdown comes, you take the pot. I'll raise a racket, you grab the money, get out that door, and beat it. I'm waving a revolver, I'm gonna go get you. I'm crazy, the other guys are gonna run. They don't wanna get messed up in a shooting. I'll split, they'll run out right after me. I'll meet you in the room next door, we'll wait until the coast is clear, and then we get the hell out."</p><p>Stan couldn't help worrying. "Sounds risky. What if I blow it?"</p><p>Vento reached into his jacket pocket and handed Stan something small and hard.</p><p>Stan held the implement on his palm. "Brass knucks?"</p><p>"If it hits the fan, the guys could get brave enough to want to punch you out, thinking they'll gang up on you. You can fight back, but you always want to even the odds."</p><p>Stan shook his head. "Seems like cheatin'."</p><p>"You want to know the secret of running a con?"</p><p>"Always carry brass knucks?"</p><p>Vento didn't smile as he shook his head. "These four guys we're playin' with, they all cheat. They don't know each other, but there's two teams of two cheaters each. I've rounded them up. They trade signals, they try to peek at the cards, all the little tricks. And that's why they deserve to be rooked. You know the old army game?"</p><p>Stan shook his head.</p><p>"You probably do, but you just don't know the name. It's the game with three walnut shells and a little pea. The con artist takes bets—pea's under the middle, you switch them around so fast that nobody can follow, then five gets ten if the mark can pick out the shell with the pea under it. OK, it's a scam, the pea's in your hand, not under any of the three shells, right? And it's rubber, not real—you can squish it between two fingers and keep it hidden. The trick is, you make like you nearly fumble, let the mark get a look at the pea under, say, the right shell. Instead of five, he wants to bet you fifty, 'cause he thinks he's stolen a look and can cheat you. So you let him bet fifty and he still loses. But once in a hundred times, the guy will say, 'This isn't fair. I happened to see which shell it's under, so I won't bet you on this one.'" Vento held his finger up. "Then what do you do? You do it straight, or you palm the pea and let the guy win. You never cheat an honest man."</p><p>"I'll remember that," Stan said.</p><p>"So about the poker game tonight. You're gonna be a pretty consistent loser in the game. Don't let that bother you. You're playing a role. If it was a straight game, you'd still lose, because you're green. We pull this off, I'll give you a crash course. You gotta learn to read people. Everybody has tells—you can see when they got a bum hand, when they got a fair one or a good one. Just have to know what to watch for. And you gotta watch your own tells and get rid of them, so nobody reads <em>you</em>. To be a successful gambler, that's one thing you have to know. The other thing is sincerity. People have to know you're honest. Once you learn to fake sincerity, you got it knocked."</p>
<hr/><p>Vento was good. The poker game played like the last act of <em>Hamlet. </em></p><p>Stanley laid down four kings, read 'em and weep.</p><p>The marks who'd just lost on good hands were threatening, yelling, Stan stuffed the bills in his pockets, kicked his chair back from the table, rolled backward and onto his feet, and he was out of the room while Vento, to all appearances drunk, drew a .38 revolver, unloaded though the four didn't know that, and screamed, "I'll kill the little SOB!"</p><p>Vento had rented the next room, though nobody in the poker party knew that. Vento and Stan had taped the door, which normally locked when you closed it, so it wouldn't lock. Stan was through the door within two seconds. The noise from next door got louder, the door opened and Vento ducked in, stripping the tape from the door. This time the door clicked. Vento held a finger to his lips, grabbed a glass from the set-up on the room's credenza, and pressed it against the wall, leaning his ear against the glass bottom to hear what was going on.</p><p>After less than three minutes—and Stan didn't need the glass to hear—the four guys hurried out of the room and stampeded down the hall.</p><p>Vento set the glass down. "They're scattering. They're sure I'm gonna shoot up the place. This is another key thing for a sting like this, kid. Pick marks that are shady to begin with. Also look for ones that don't keep their heads in a panic—not ones that fight, ones that run. We'll haul out of town as soon as the coast is clear, shake hands, and go our separate ways. How was the take?"</p><p>"Better than you said," Stan told him, nodding at the stacks of money on the table. "Net of $8750, after your eighteen hundred seed money's out. Here's that back." Stan handed over a stack of eighteen hundred-dollar bills—representing the money that Vento had given to him to play with.</p><p>"You know I'm going to check your pockets."</p><p>Grinning, Stan stood up and turned out all his pockets, took off his shoes and socks, and asked, "Want me to go further?"</p><p>"You're an honest kid," Vento said. "Nah. Put your shoes back on. Let's divide the take."</p><p>Stan's cut came to $2188, but to his surprise, Vento added another four hundred to that—a cut of his original stake of eighteen hundred. "Cut cards with you—half of that back if I win."</p><p>"No, sir, I think I got a peek at the cards," Stan said.</p><p>Vento laughed. "Not bad, kid, not bad. Work on the fake honesty. You got possibilities. I thought you did the first time I saw you. I'm heading to Louisville. Another hundred if you drive me."</p><p>"Nah, I'll do it for nothin', 'cause you already taught me a lot. You're gonna bet on the Derby?" Stan asked, surprised.</p><p>"We'll see. If I can pick up some inside dope on the horses, maybe. But there's good pickings on the fringe, too, so maybe not. I don't recommend bettin' on horses, by the way."</p><p>"I don't know anything about horses," Stan said. "To me, they're just big animals, like cows, you know?"</p><p>"The cattle of the sun, in this case," Vento said.</p><p>Stan blinked. "Huh?"</p><p>"The cream of the crop, you might say. All thoroughbreds. Pure gold on the hoof. Never mind. Hand me the phone, kid."</p><p>Stan passed him the phone, and Vento spoke briefly to someone on the front desk. "Thanks," he said at last. "Soon as you get your break, come up to room 876. Look under the phone." He hung up. "Pretty much the way I figured. Mr. Bledsoe's parked himself in the lobby. He's got more guts than the others, he'll be watching for both of us. Let's cut out." He put a hundred-dollar bill under the phone. Stan hesitated a moment, then added a hundred from his own cut.</p><p>"Good man," Vento said. "Now I'm gonna show you how to get around in a hotel, kid. Pay attention and learn."'</p><p>Another phone call, this one an unlisted hotel number that connected with the laundry. "Come on."</p><p>They hustled down the hallways to a niche where a door was marked STAFF. Almost as soon as they got there, the door opened and a guy in a white jacket said, "This way."</p><p>Vento passed the guy a twenty, and they rode down the freight elevator, along with a cart stacked with folded towels. From the laundry room they walked through the steamy kitchen, from the kitchen to the alley, from the alley to the street behind the hotel, where Stan took the parking ticket from under the driver's side windshield wiper. Stan got behind the wheel, and they obeyed all the traffic laws as they left town.</p><p>Vento put the fake traffic ticket in the glove compartment. "You may need this again. It's a park-anywhere card."</p><p>Stan drove Vento all the way to Louisville, where Vento had already made a reservation in a moderate hotel—under a different name. Vento took his suitcases out of the trunk, shook hands with Stanley and said, "Thanks for the help, kid. Don't get cocky, and remember, everything that works for a gambler or a con artist works double good for a salesman. See you in the funny papers."</p><p>Stan found his usual grungy quarters in the usual grungy hotel. He had a week until May 6, when the Derby would be run at Churchill Downs. Not much time, but he decided to see if he could run a mild little scam.</p><p>For tourists, there were these trifold brochures with directions to the race track, some information about betting for absolute newbies, a summary of laws and so on. They were free. Stan collected handfuls.</p><p>He still had the little junky portable typewriter. In a stationery store he bought a package of blank greeting cards—real simple, just 4x5, single-fold, two to a page—and again found a copier store to run off a hundred sheets, printed front and back. The front of each card read TIP SHEET, OPEN MAY 6 AFTER 7 AM. With white glue, Stan sealed all the cards so you couldn't open them without using a letter opener or similar. And he pasted one card inside each brochure.</p><p>Then he . . . hung around as tourists came into town for the Derby. He'd wander until he heard some guys talking about the race, and then—</p><p>"Pardon me, gentlemen, but if you're interested in racing, I got the latest inside information right here. Care to buy this valuable booklet? Only five dollars."</p><p>When people declined, Stan congratulated them: "You're an honest guy. I appreciate that." And he moved on.</p><p>However, Vento had been correct—only about one in a hundred declined. The other ninety-nine got a greedy gleam in their eyes and forked over the money.</p><p>Stan gave himself just two days—after that it would be uncomfortable to hang around and maybe be recognized by any of his clients. Oh, he cautioned them—"You'll get the best advice on the race you could possibly get when you open the inner card, but this could land us in real big trouble, so it's best not to open it until like a couple hours before the race. And then get rid of it, for your own sake and mine."</p><p>It worked. In two days, Stan had made the traveling money that would get him from Kentucky to Tennessee, where he'd use the cushion of the poker winnings to set up another identity and figure out something he could sell. Maybe even take a sales position with some sharp huckster, pick up more education. "I can do it," Stan told himself. "I know I got it in me. I'll show 'em. Show 'em I can make a fortune all on my own."</p><p>All on his own. Yeah. Ford off at college. Shermy and his wife thinking of moving to California, where a partner was ready to go in with him to open up some computer stores or some deal. Dad a looming, fuming danger. Himself banned.</p><p>On the drive south, Stan listened to the Kentucky Derby on the radio. The announcers went nuts as a horse named Riva Ridge, the favorite from the beginning, had won,.</p><p>"Huh," Stan said aloud. "So the payout was meh. And what kind of name is Riva Ridge? I never woulda gone for that. Lucky I didn't bet."</p><p>He wished he had somebody to boast to about his win at cards. Or to ask if they thought he'd cheated. Or to talk about the luck, the little good and the much bad, he'd been through since leaving home. Or . . . Stan, at the wheel and driving into the evening, found his eyes blurring. Or just somebody to talk to, period. God, this was a lonely road.</p><p>He hoped that the guys who'd bought his brochures and inside tip card were pleased. After all, he was honest with them. Each card really did contain the best advice he could offer them:</p><p>
  <em>Don't bet on horse races.</em>
</p>
<hr/>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Off Course</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1971-1972)</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>7: Off Course</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(May 1972-November 1974)</em>
</p><p>Tennessee was pretty much a bust. He couldn't get a sales promotion going, it was difficult to find a card game that had an open seat for him, and to be honest, he wasn't yet that good. He did a little worse than breaking even, and he suspected—but couldn't prove—that more than once a card shark had joined the party. Once toward the end of his stay in the state, he had noticed something subtly wrong.</p><p>When the dealer began to shoot out the cards, Stan watched the back and said, "Four of clubs. Ace of diamonds. Deuce of spades. Jack of hearts. Eight of clubs." Then he turned his hand over and displayed it. "Am I right or am I right?"</p><p>The big guy to Stan's right asked reasonably, "What the hell?"</p><p>"I just noticed the little dots on the back," Stan said, flipping a card over. "Handy, 'cause you can read 'em from the back just as good as on the front."</p><p>The dealer was sweating. "I swear, it was a joke—"</p><p>Two other players prevented him from exerting himself by grabbing his arms. The guy to Stan's right said, "Kid, get your money and leave. You don't want to see this."</p><p>Suddenly realizing the gravity of the situation, Stan meticulously counted out his stake from the money on the table and left. For the next three days he apprehensively bought and read newspapers, but there was no mention of a guy's corpse found in suspicious circumstances. Early the next week, when he was bussing tables in a bar and grill (temporary job while he cast about for a sales opportunity), one of the guys from the poker game walked in. Stan asked him, "So what happened to the guy with the marked cards?"</p><p>The guy stared at him in a way that made him shiver a little. Then recognition dawned. "You're the guy who spotted the marks on the cards," he said in a low voice. "We didn't ice the <em>cafone</em> if that's what you're worried about. We gave him a beat-down and put him on a bus out of town."</p><p>"OK," Stan said. "Didn't mean to pry."</p><p>"Kid, you're too green to gamble in that league. We owed you for spotting something we should've latched onto, but—keep your distance and be safe, understand?"</p><p>"I was just plannin' to move out of state," Stan said.</p><p>"Travel safe."</p>
<hr/><p>North Carolina wasn't any better, though he stayed there for months until his money began to run low, and then South Carolina turned out to be worse—for his purposes, anyway. He spent a lonely New Years' Day in Columbia, realized how low his money was running, and hustled a little here and there, playing small-stakes poker and winning somewhat more than losing.</p><p>Spring came on, and by then his bank account had finally risen enough to make it possible for him to do another sales pitch. He came up with an angle and headed east, toward the Atlantic.</p><p>Then near Myrtle Beach, he did have a small winning streak with StanBlock, a sunscreen product that he concocted from harmless ingredients, including olive oil, coconut oil, beeswax, and zinc oxide, plus a drop of essential oil (lavender) for aroma. It was so-so as a sunscreen. He didn't know from SPF, but the stuff would keep you from getting sunburned if you reapplied it about once an hour and didn't stay outside more than four hours in total. He was able to order six-ounce plastic bottles, imprinted with the name and a cartoon sun that looked like a deranged orange as a logo.</p><p>His booth on the beach did reasonable business, and he even met a girl who took his mind off Carla for about an hour. But she was visiting from Ohio, and they had only one date, going to an amusement center and playing video games before taking a walk on the beach and finding a place to get friendly for a little while. The very next morning she took off for home.</p><p>And then in June it turned out that there were FDA guidelines on sunscreen. Who knew? Stu Parsons received a subpoena to appear in court to answer charges, and the next morning, Statler Payne drove past a sign saying, "Welcome to Georgia." He spent some time in Augusta, then more time in Decatur, which was a suburb of Atlanta, picking up the dialect and talking about stuff that bugged the locals.</p><p>That September, people around the state began to see a late-night commercial on TV. A brown-haired guy in a white linen suit with a black ribbon tie stood in a parking lot next to a bright orange Dodge Charger. With his arms akimbo, his fists on his hips in an attitude of anger, the guy was staring at the car. Then he turned around with an expression of disgust. He wore a goatee and mustache that made him look a little bit like a Civil War soldier.</p>
<hr/><p>STAN: (WAVING AT CAMERA) Oh, hey, neighbors. Does this ever happen to you-all?</p><p>
  <em>(CLOSE-UP on a small part of the car hood. It has a yellow-green, gummy splotch on it)</em>
</p><p>STAN: Dog my cats! I done got me a big ol' splat of pine sap on my car. What to do? What to do?</p><p>
  <em>(TRICK SHOT, Stan in an outfit vaguely reminiscent of a male cheerleader's, plus cardboard wings like a dragonfly's stapled to the shoulders, appears as a tiny figure standing next to the spot on the car, which is now the size of a mud puddle)</em>
</p><p>STAN/FAIRY: Cuss my grits! That there's a bad old mess, Mr. Parsons!</p><p>STAN: (Trick shot, he leans over the tiny figure) Why, who are you?</p><p>STAN/FAIRY: Why, I'm Mr. Saperstein, the Sap Removal Fairy! What y'all need is a touch of Stanco Tar and Sap remover!</p><p>
  <em>(TRICK SHOT: The fairy waves a wand and an eight-ounce bottle of some purple liquid appears; it is labeled StanCo Tar &amp; Sap Remover, only $10)</em>
</p><p>STAN/FAIRY: Here you go, Mr. Parsons! Jes' only wipe it on, then wipe it off, and like magic, sap and tar disappear! Just takes a little old dab, now!</p><p>(STAN pours four small drops of the liquid on the splotch, then wipes it with a cloth. He does a double-take and points. The sap is all gone, the hood shiny)</p><p>STAN: Shut my mouth! It's like magic! Thanks, Mr. Saperstein! This is Colonel Statler Parsons, tellin' y'all that Stanco Sap and Tar Remover works like a charm. Order it here!</p><p>(MAIL-ORDER INFO POPS UP FOR REMAINDER OF AD)</p>
<hr/><p>His pitch was moderately successful. Though his impression of a Southern gentleman probably wouldn't fool any viewer who wasn't a half-blind, half-deaf old hound dog, he was amusing, and lots of folks in that area of Georgia did know what it was like to wake up with gooey sap decorating the family automobile. And the stuff did work. Kind of. It absolutely did remove sap. And, as it turned out, automobile paint as well.</p><p>Once again Stan faced the advent of a quick getaway. This time he went south to Florida, where a brand-new tourist destination had opened the previous October. Stan found a source of cheap rip-off toys from a far-off country, Rippovia, where they were manufactured in sweatshops by political prisoners. In Orlando his pseudonym became Welt Ditzey, and he hawked cut-rate Ricky Rodent and Dunnald Drake stuffed toys. Perhaps because the tourist attraction was only a year and a few weeks old, Stan settled in for nearly a three-month visit—one of the longer stretches during which he'd stayed put after leaving home.</p><p>However, well aware from past experience that his career as a pitchman had a limited life expectancy in Florida, at any rate, he took some time off. He spent a few days in New Orleans, where he found an aging card sharp, Red Filou, who for a fee tutored him in the card arts. When Stan Pines had a definite goal in mind, he could work with patience and determination.</p><p>For a time every morning Stan would rise, drive to the booth where he sold his tchotchkes, check the inventory, and man the counter until five in the afternoon. Then his assistant, a local teen who he knew dipped into the till, though never for very much, spelled him for the last four hours.</p><p>Stan had dinner somewhere first, and then spent the rest of those four hours with a deck of cards. He learned special riffs while shuffling. He became so adept that eventually he could cut, shuffle, and deal one-handed, equally well with left or right hand. He didn't join in any poker games, though. Not yet. He was getting better, but he needed to be downright perfect.</p><p>That took time and patience. And a deck of cards.</p>
<hr/><p>Another holiday season came and passed, and again Stan felt more alone than ever. Then, on the last day of the year, Stan drove to the booth, not yet open, and saw half a dozen vehicles parked near it, each van or car bearing a logo like three bowling balls in silhouette, two of them balanced on top of the third. Guys in blue sport jackets were taking photos of everything from the sign (WELT DITZEY'S DISCOUNT MART) and—geeze, they must've busted in the place—of rows of shoddy stuffed dolls.</p><p>"Happiest place on Earth while it lasted," Stan muttered. He passed the booth, went back to the motel long enough to collect his junk, then took I-75 due north, then I-10 west across the state's panhandle. He had driven that way before, on his trips to New Orleans. This time he stopped in Mobile, Alabama.</p><p>He took stock. He'd started off with a few hundred bucks, thanks to Mom. His bank balance had ranged from a high of four thousand bucks to as little as negative twelve dollars. Currently it was in the middle, not quite two thousand.</p><p>That evening, Stan wrote a letter home.</p>
<hr/><p>
  <em>Dear Ma and Pop,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I know I have not been the "best" of sons and you haven't heard from me in a long time. I want you to know that I am OK and that I think of you a lot.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I am sorry for what happened to Ford and hope he is doing good in college, but I guess he probably is, because he is a "Brainiac." He will be alright. Really tho, busting his machine was an accident and I never meant to do it and I would make it up to him if I knew how. I guess Shermy and Mona and little Alex must be out in Calif. now and I hope you dont miss the baby to much. I hope you are not lonely and I would so love seeing you again, Ma.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>This is the trouble. I am not as smart as Ford. I cant figure out any way I can make it up to him but if I could, I would. I am sorry for disappointing you, Pop. You told me not to come home until I have made a fortune.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Believe me I am trying but it might take a little while</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>He stopped writing. He lay on his motel-room bed and stared at his motel-room TV without really paying attention to what was on. It was the movie of the week, but though he lay there all through it, afterward he could never remember what the film was. The next morning he crumpled the unfinished letter and chucked it into the wastebasket.</p><p>"Screw it," he said. "I'll do it. Somehow I'll make a million bucks, and then I'll come back home and throw it in Pop's face. And then I'll walk out again and go out and make another million for myself. And then you'll all be sorry, and—and—aw, screw it."</p><p>Mobile wasn't great territory for sales opportunities, but it did have a thriving gambling subculture. Stan became an active participant. The games and the small casinos were illegal, true—under the radar—and they'd remain that way for another twenty years. For the moment, though, somebody who could make quiet inquiries could get hooked up pretty quick.</p><p>And through the casinos, he got connected with private poker parties and crap games.</p><p>Ah, craps. He liked the game in some ways—it moved fast, and as long as you controlled your betting, you weren't likely to go broke. He'd bought himself several pairs of dice and spent hours learning just how to toss them—from bare hands, from a cup, whatever. His percentage of good throws rose—you can't fully control straight dice, but you could acquire a certain amount of skill—and he figured that he could make a point about fifty-two per cent of the time. A very small edge, but then the house always had a small edge, and that made the house rich.</p><p>Stan preferred informal crap games to the <em>sub rosa</em> casinos. He'd only play dice with guys he got to know and whose behavior he was confident he understood. It didn't pay to win a game gambling against lugs who'd break your legs if they lost and you won.</p><p>So when Stan had some control over the nature of the party, he'd have them set a limit—everybody would shoot until half of them had lost a hundred bucks, then they'd all quit.</p><p>It worked well with his little crowd. Stan didn't always win, but he won often enough to clear his living expenses each week. The poker games, they were a little different. Stan had practiced dealing, he had gone into a thorough study of human expressions and behavior. Within six hands, he could spot players who had subtle tells—the guy who'd put one finger on his right cheek whenever he was bluffing, or the one whose eyebrows would raise an eighth of an inch when he had a good hand.</p><p>Heck, some mooks were easy. One evening Stan discovered that the high roller among the party was very cagy with his cards, not fanning them, but holding them in a tight little stack, just barely peeling back the corners to check what he was holding.</p><p>The kicker was that the guy wore glasses, and the way he held the cards and the way the light was hitting them, the reflections of those corners showed clear. The glasses guy was a good player, and a lousy winner, needling the poor schlubs who lost to him, particularly when he bluffed.</p><p>That evening the pot was high for the games Stan played in—north of fifteen hundred dollars. One by one players dropped out. Glasses guy hadn't drawn any cards and was so cool and confident that they were pretty sure he was holding at least a full house.</p><p>Stan, however, had seen the reflections in those spectacles. Glasses held almost a straight flush—ten, Jack, Queen, and King spades, plus . . . a six of diamonds.</p><p>Stan pretended to be worried. He squirmed and sweated. Inhaled and sighed. Bit his lip and softly groaned.</p><p>And seeing that, Glasses kept trying to psych him out, giving him what sounded like friendly, paternal warnings. "Better be careful, kid. You might want to eat next week."</p><p>Finally when the showdown came, Glasses tossed his hand down with a savage grunt of dissatisfaction. Stan, the only other player who hadn't folded, revealed his measly pair of eights and took the pot. From then on, Glasses refused to play in a game if Stan was sitting in.</p><p>However, Stan always learned his lessons. In the last few days, he had realized that he was a little bit far-sighted. He had trouble reading small print, and his cards were a little blurry. When he had some money in the bank, he made an appointment with an optometrist, who diagnosed his vision as needing 1.2 correction—not severe. But, with the poker night in mind, Stan asked, "Hey, Doc, can the lenses be the kind that don't reflect?"</p><p>There was an upcharge, but Stan paid it. And he chose cheap frames, squarish and black.</p><p>When the glasses came, he tried them on and looked at himself in the mirror. At first he concentrated just on the lenses as he moved his head around, tilting it up and down and side to side, noting that the specs didn't reflect at all. Then he noticed his face.</p><p>Oh, God. Stanford stared back at him.</p><p>"I look just like him," Stanley told his reflection.</p><p>However, he'd never make the mistake that Glasses had made. That day he started to wear the glasses, at first just when he was reading or gambling. Little by little he got used to them. Not to the prescription, but to the way he looked.</p><p>Still, from time to time he'd catch his reflection unexpectedly, in a shop window, in the rear-view, whatever, and for a sharp, short moment his heart would ache.</p><p>But, he told himself, "Get used to it. You ain't gonna ever see him again."</p><p>He was getting along OK. But nobody, especially Stanley himself, could plausibly say that he was happy. Well into 1974, Stan's luck turned sour.</p><p>Not long before midnight one muggy, hot Saturday, a squad of cops busted in on a private card party in the back room of a locksmith's shop, closed for the evening and paradoxically, not locked. Stan didn't even try to run and got rounded up with everybody else, his driver's license—an Alabama one, he was Phil Beauregard here—taken, the whole bit. As it happened, Glasses Guy was there, too, at a separate table and also got arrested.</p><p>The cop in charge was Sergeant Lester Grogan, and he looked like he was tough enough to chew the gamblers up and swallow them. He seemed to know Glasses Guy, and he pinned him against the wall and told him to come clean, they were gonna bust illegal gaming in this town.</p><p>And Stan heard Glasses Guy telling Sergeant Lester Grogan that Phil over there, the young guy, had organized the gambling party. Uh-huh. Stan was docile and cooperative and learned what it felt like to have his hands cuffed behind him.</p><p>In court the next day, Stan used a good portion of his bankroll to pay bail.</p><p>Then the very next day, driving on his South Carolina license (Styler Petty), Stan headed for the Midwest.</p><p>People who lived in the Midwest were supposed to be good citizens. Trusting guys. Good customers for a guy who could make a polished sales pitch. His kind of people.</p><p>He hoped. Because he was getting tired of this routine, settling in, making a little dough, then losing it again and having to flee. Over and over and over. He'd done it so many times—this latest one because the cops led by good old Sergeant Grogan looked like hungry cannibals.</p><p>As he left Alabama he decided not to stop before he got at least as far as Illinois.</p><p>His anger faded into regret. Then he reflected that he had some money in his wallet, that he knew more now about making money than he'd known when he left home, that maybe he didn't have any close friends, but he was learning how to ingratiate himself and that some people (thanks, Windy. Thanks, Red) did like him, and that if he could only find the way to create a lucrative legit business, Eddie Pinter had guaranteed him some financial backing that he'd hardly touched yet (thanks, Pinky!).</p><p>So along about Memphis, he started to hum. And by the time he passed the Illinois border, he was actually singing—"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."</p><p>He chuckled. "So ol' Leroy is the baddest guy on the south side of Chicago, huh?" He hummed a little more of the tune, and then said, "Wait 'til they get a load of me!"</p>
<hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Men Can Be Such Pigs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>(1971-1972)</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>8: Men Can Be Such Pigs</strong>
</p><p>(November 1974-January 1976)</p><p>In Chicago, Stan learned that Leroy Brown had evidently moved without leaving a forwarding address. However, a whole lot of people seemed to be in competition for the title of "Bad Bad." They included rugged-looking, scowling guys called Snakey, Dutch, Flash, and Jimmy Two-Guns. Stan stayed polite whenever he ran across them but deliberately failed to meet any of them socially.</p><p>One thing he discovered quickly: Chicago wasn't what it used to be, or what the old black and white movies on TV implied. Scarface Al was dead and gone, nailed by the Feds on a tax rap, of all things, before he died in relative obscurity. Gangsters no longer roared through the frightened streets in A-model Fords, Tommy guns bristling from every window, typewriting death across the innocent citizens and normally completely missing Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson.</p><p>But if the danger days had faded, so had the most prosperous days. To build a stake, Stan actually tried the shell game on street corners. First time out, he rooked a poor guy for five bucks, then cheerfully said, "Whatta ya say, pal, double or nothing?"</p><p>The gaunt man had shaken his head and turned out his pockets. He didn't even have a wallet. He trudged away, but after three steps, Stan said, "Hey, pal, wait."</p><p>He folded up his game and asked the guy, "You broke?"</p><p>The fellow looked away, not answering him. He rubbed his eyes, and his fingers came away wet. He nodded without speaking.</p><p>"Ya eat today?"</p><p>This time he shook his head.</p><p>"Come on, that coffee shop's got a pretty good spread. I'll stake you to breakfast." When the guy stubbornly shook his head Stan said, "Buddy, I been in your shoes before. Come on, it's on me. No obligation."</p><p>The guy, with shabby dignity, first went to the john in the small restaurant. When he came out, he'd wet his hair and washed his face. He'd tucked in his faded work shirt and sat in a back booth with Stanley.</p><p>"What do you want?" Stan asked.</p><p>He shrugged.</p><p>"You're not makin' this easy," Stanley grumbled, but not in an angry tone. "Stack of pancakes, couple eggs—scrambled? No? Fried? OK, fried, some sausage links, coffee, then a melon cup to finish off with. That sound good?"</p><p>"Yes," the man whispered. He grabbed a paper napkin and patted his lips.</p><p>
  <em>Geez, the poor shlub is slobbering, he's so hungry.</em>
</p><p>The waitress brought their breakfast. Stan's guest looked at the four pancakes, the two eggs over easy, the four sausage links, with big eyes that looked like they were ready to eat everything. Stan had ordered just an egg and toast, plus the coffee and melon, and he said, "There ya go, pal. Eat, you'll feel better."</p><p>Stan had trouble swallowing. The shlub didn't exactly eat like an animal, but he leaned close to the plate, as if afraid somebody would steal it, and he ate with knife in one hand, fork in the other, elbows up and pumping. He drank two cups of coffee and then polished off the small bowl of honeydew and cantaloupe.</p><p>"Want something else?" Stan asked.</p><p>Again, the guy only whispered: "No, I thank you kindly."</p><p>"My name's Stewart Attica," Stan said. "What's your handle?"</p><p>"George Milton."</p><p>"George Milton. You can call me Stew. You, uh, you ain't from this burg, are you?"</p><p>Milton shook his head. "K-Kentucky," he said.</p><p>"What do you do for a living?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Anything I can get," Milton said. "Only there ain't anything these days. I used to work at the airport, but ATA went bankrupt. I didn't get severance or anything. That was last year. I, uh, I panhandle when I can, but nobody's got spare change anymore."</p><p>Stan made a face. Yeah, the oil shortage. Rationing, you can buy ten gallons, no more, and the price is way up, buddy. The scarcity had started to ripple through the economy. "How long since you last ate?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Don't remember." Milton frowned. "Uh, two days? Three? I been pickin' up bottles and cans for the deposit pennies, and I just got five dollars together—sorry. Thank you, Mr. I better go."</p><p>"Have one more cup of coffee. Listen, George, if you could do anything, what would you want to do?"</p><p>"Go home!" he blurted. Then he clamped his mouth, as if he'd said something nasty. "My pappy has a farm," he said. "I ran away from home. I don't know if he'd take me or not, but I wouldn't starve."</p><p>"How old are you?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Twenty-one," the guy said defiantly.</p><p><em>Huh. I'd've pegged him at forty!</em> Bu a closer look showed him that George Milton was indeed a young fellow. Just used hard by life. Fleetingly, Stan wondered if he looked older than his age himself. Probably. Constant traveling had robbed him of sleep, had bagged his eyes.</p><p>"You think if you go to your dad and tell him you're sorry for what you done, and you want to make it up to your family—you think he'd run you off? Really?</p><p>"No, my dad's a good man," George said. "If he wouldn't let me live in the house, he'd hire me on to work, let me maybe sleep in the barn. But what's the use?"</p><p>
  <em>Crap. If I went to my old man and apologized—crap!</em>
</p><p>Stan handed George his five-dollar bill. "Here you go, man. I tricked you. That game's a scam. You can't win."</p><p>"You're right about that," Milton said, humbly accepting the money. "I can't win. But I thank you kindly."</p><p>"Where you stayin'?"</p><p>"Anywhere I can. Sometimes I can find a warm place. If not, lots of times I can find an unlocked car—"</p><p>Dammit! "Come with me, man," Stan said.</p><p>They walked to Harrison, shivering under the assault of Chicago's famous and very cold wind. The Greyhound terminal was busy—lots of people who couldn't gas up their cars were taking the bus these days.</p><p>George's dad, George Senior, and mom Lula lived near Lexington. A ticket from Chicago to Lexington was forty-two bucks. Stan forked it over. The next bus would leave in a couple of hours. "We'll wait," Stan said.</p><p>At least the bus station was warm. While they sat, he got Milton to talk a little about his life. He hadn't finished high school—dropped out in the winter of his senior year. He'd run away, and since Chicago was a big enough place to lose himself in, that's where he headed. Somehow or other he'd heard that ATA, a small airline specializing mainly in business travelers, was hiring, and that in the job they had open, all you had to do was tote and move luggage.</p><p>The first year he'd squeaked by on that. Milton had never fooled with any drug stronger than a little pot, and he didn't do much of that. He didn't drink because "Paw Paw was a awful drunk, and I didn't want to end up like him, dying with the DT's and a rotten liver."</p><p>And then with no advance warning, the airline went bust and his job went . . . away.</p><p>They announced the bus, Stan walked Milton out to the boarding area, and then he handed him forty bucks, two twenties. "I'll pay you back," Milton said, obviously trying hard to hold it all together.</p><p>"Naw," Stan said. "Only when you get back on your feet and you run across some guy who's had it rough, help him out. That's the way you pay me. Listen, now—I know what you been through. You're lucky because you got a family that'll take you back. I won't go into it, but I ain't that lucky. Promise me now, that you'll go the distance, call your folks, and go home."</p><p>"Yeah, I do promise," George said.</p><p>"Swear it," Stan said roughly, firmly. "Swear on your mother's life."</p><p>"I swear on Mama's life," George said.</p><p>"Look in my eyes."</p><p>George met his gaze. He looked so absurdly young that Stan suddenly had the feeling that George was only half his age instead of roughly the same age.</p><p>"All right, kid. I'm gonna trust you. You remember that. I don't trust nobody, but this time I'm trusting you. Don't you let me down."</p><p>"I won't," George whispered. He held out his hand, and Stan shook it. He watched the bus roll away.</p><p>"I'm a damn idiot," he told himself. He walked all the way back to the cheap hotel, loaded his car, checked out, and drove away from Chicago. What the hell, maybe he could get something going in, oh, say, Indiana.</p><hr/><p>Six weeks later, when Henry Henryson was making pretty fair money in Indiana as a pitchman for Stanco laundry products, out of curiosity he looked up the number of George Milton, Senior, in Kentucky. He placed a long-distance call, and a woman answered. "Mrs. Milton?" he asked.</p><p>"Yessir," she said in that kind of endearing, southern-hick accent.</p><p>"Is George, Junior, at home?"</p><p>A hesitation. Then she said, "He's out in the fields with his daddy. Spring planting, you know. Do you want me to give him a message?"</p><p>Stan had to think for a minute before he could remember who he'd been in Chicago. "Just tell him his friend Stewart's glad he's home again."</p><p>"So are we," the woman whispered.</p><p>He hung up, half happy and half disappointed. He was glad that George's folks had taken him back, but unreasonably disappointed that his expectation—that George wouldn't keep his promise, or that he'd only run away again—hadn't proved true. Things like this made it hard to be a cynic.</p><p>A week later, he sped out of Indiana, barely ahead of an angry mob dressed in tight clothes that had shrunk three sizes after laundering their garments in Stanco's Wash You Were Here. If he'd had more ready money or easy access to his credit line with Pinter, Stan might have headed for the west coast.</p><p>He didn't, so with the price of gas an all, he just drove north to Wisconsin.</p><hr/><p>There as Walter Kleindorf, he peddled an additive that was guaranteed to increase the amount of cheese a gallon of milk would make by thirty per cent. And it worked. Unfortunately, it made the cheese taste like unwashed gym socks. It smelled fine, but the taste—gah.</p><p>In Iowa, he sold TV rabbit-ear aerials that did work, for about two weeks, before the cheap plastic base disintegrated.</p><p>In North Dakota, it was Stanco's Sparkle Brite, a toothpaste that would make your teeth shiny. It did, too—fluorescent green, to be sure, but man, they were shiny!</p><p>South Dakota didn't last too long. There the product was a gimmick that allowed one to make free long-distance telephone calls—all it took was blowing a whistle like device to produce a few tones. "And it's absolutely, one hundred per cent legal!" Willis Goodman promised in the TV ads. It absolutely, one hundred per cent was not.</p><p>Nebraska was full of farmers, so there Michael Durfee, the Farmer's Friend, sold the Stanco Aw Shucks corn husker. It worked if the ear of corn were a specific diameter. If it wasn't, the device left the husk on or created corn mush.</p><p>And then Kansas. Good old Kansas! Kansas, where people were simple and gullible. When Stan got there in the harvest season of 1975, he was reasonably flush, with the healthiest bank account he'd had in over a year. He looked around, talked to some folks who could provide him with cut-rate products, and decided on one.</p><p>This time, he thought, might just be the charm.</p><hr/><p>(STAN APPEARS ON CAMERA, STANDING IN FRONT OF A WHITEBOARD. HE WEARS A GRAY WIG AND A FULL FAKE GRAY BEARD, ALONG WITH ROUND PROP GLASSES THAT MAGNIFY HIS EYES, AND HE IS DRESSED IN A WHITE LAB JACKET AND WEARS A DOCTOR'S HEAD REFLECTOR AND A STETHESCOPE HANGS AROUND HIS NECK)</p><p>STAN: Hello, housewives! I'm Doctor Sheldon Medicine, and I have some questions for you!</p><p>(FOR 1/30 OF A SECOND, A CAPTION FLASHES ONSCREEN, IN TINY WHITE LETTERS AGAINST THE FRONT OF STAN'S WHITE JACKET: <em>not a real doctor</em>)</p><p>STAN: Ladies, do your menfolk look like . . . <em>this</em>?</p><p>(A FIVE-SECOND MONTAGE OF TEN UNFLATTERING PHOTOS OF OVERWEIGHT KANSAS GUYS, RANGING FROM 250 TO 350 POUNDS)</p><p>STAN: Would you prefer them to look like the guy you married? More like this?</p><p>(A FOUR-SECOND MONTAGE OF THREE HANDSOME BUFF GUYS IN SPEEDOS, POSING BESIDE A SWIMMING POOL, LIFTING BARBELLS, AND WINKING AT THE CAMERA)</p><p>STAN: That's more like it, eh? What, I ask you, can turn this—(QUICK SHOT OF A FAT GUY LOUNGING IN A RECLINER)—into this? (LONGER SHOT OF BUFF, HANDSOME GUY LOUNGING IN A RUMPLED BED AND SMILING A BEDROOM LOOK TOWARD THE CAMERA). Let me answer that: it's Stanco Product's miracle diet powder, Weight a Minute! Yes, Weight a Minute has all the nutritious ingredients that promote fat loss and muscle gain. And it also makes a guy feel a whole lot more romantic, know what I mean? This is all proved by my exhaustive scientific medical tests!</p><p>(ANOTHER 1/30 OF A SECOND TINY CAPTION, WHITE ON WHITE: <em>no tests were performed</em>)</p><p>STAN: Normally, this secret formula is only provided by the Soviet Army for their brigades of super soldiers! It's absolutely tasteless. As you cook your man's favorite meals, just sprinkle in one teaspoon of this wonder product and watch the change begin! He doesn't have to go on frustrating diets or wear himself out with exhausting exercise! He'll never know what happened—but you'll see the difference! Order before the price shoots up! Only $29.99 for a one-month supply! Send your check to the address below, today! I'm Dr. Medicine and this wonderful product, Weight a Minute from Stanco, has my iron-clad guarantee!</p><p>(FINAL CAPTION, EQUALLY UNREADABLE: <em>not an actual guarantee</em>)</p><hr/><p>Hot Belgian waffles! The orders poured in.</p><p>As the months passed, Stan began to think of settling down. He moved from his cheap motel into a very respectable apartment, living room, kitchen/dinette, and bedroom, with a real bathtub in the bathroom, not just a tiny shower.</p><p>He kept the Stanleymobile garaged and leased a Ford Elite, which hinted at prosperity without being too gaudy. He got out more—went to movies, met a few people, joked around, got introduced to some of those Kansas ladies.</p><p>Cornfed beauties, he called them. Susie and Hannah and Josie and Tilly. Most of them were the daughters of farmers or farm-equipment dealers.</p><p>He became very friendly with Josie Hall, whose dad, Thornton, had the state franchise for Earthworm Tractors, Inc. Her dad, a heavyweight in body as well as in business, liked him. After Stan and Tilly had gone on about six dates, one evening Thornton ("Call me Thorny") clapped Stan on the shoulder and said, "You know, in my line we need go-getting salesmen to introduce farmers to our line of tractors and farming equipment. I think you'd make a hell of a salesman. Interested?"</p><p>"Maybe," Stan said.</p><p>"Let's talk about it one day," Thorny Hall replied. "Maybe in a couple of weeks. I'll take you into the biggest showroom, right here in Kansas City, show you our line, let you watch some of our guys in action." He winked. "You'll be impressed. The whole operation is up to date. You play your cards right, young man, you just might move into management if you succeed in floor sales."</p><p>It was tempting. His daughter was a blonde, blue-eyed dumpling of a girl, not fat but plump in the right places. She was pretty bordering on beautiful, she loved to laugh, and she laughed at all of his jokes. She liked walks in the rain, hayrides, county fairs, and snuggling close and teasing.</p><p>She seemed marginally less attractive a few days later, when Stan learned from a teller at the Farmer's Third Bank—where he'd moved his account—that Mr. Hall had inquired about his balance.</p><p>"What?" Stan asked. "Is that even legal?"</p><p>"Sh-sh," said the teller, Patti, whom he had taken to lunch a couple times. "Come by at closing time, five. I'll talk to you then."</p><p>OK . . . worth buying her a steak, anyway, Stan figured.</p><p>So at five he picked her up and drove out of the city center for a few miles and then bought her dinner at the B-Bar-B Steakhouse. It wasn't a chain restaurant, and it was just all right for ambience, sort of cheesy faux ranch house, but you couldn't beat the steaks. Stan had a petite sirloin, Patti went for the Fantastic Fillet.</p><p>The steaks, medium, were so tender they melted in your mouth like butter, with a rich flavor. The accompanying baked potatoes were loaded with butter and sour cream. The salads were tangy and tasty.</p><p>"OK," Patti said when she had demolished her dinner. "I shouldn't even tell you this, but I think you ought to know. Mr. Hall's the chairman of the Business Association. He and my boss, Mr. Clewis—he's the branch manager—went to high school together. They're old buddies, you know. Well, I know that Mr. Hall went in to see Mr. Clewis, and then Mr. Clewis had me print out your account statement. I took it in to him, and he handed it to Mr. Hall."</p><p>"Huh," Stan said. "Just the savings account, or it and checking?"</p><p>"Just checking," Patti said. "Mr. Clewis just asked for your account statement, but he didn't say which. Since you have close to eight thousand in checking and only about five hundred in savings, I thought it would be better to give him that."</p><p>So that was why old Thorny thought Stan might be a good match for his little girl. Young guy, pretty well off, personable, humorous, a good prospect as a salesman. Rope him into the family business. Good way to hogtie him for Josie.</p><p>How to deal with this, how to deal with this. Stan knew he could lodge a complaint with the banking authorities, but did he want to?</p><p>He considered the possibilities. Josie was a cute little bundle, no question. He liked her. But—committing for a lifetime? Did he really want to join the family firm, live in this flat state with a flat job for all his flat life?</p><p>Maybe . . . not.</p><p>The reason that Stan's account was so flush was that he was buying product. The concoction that he called Weight a Minute was some Asian vitamin-and-mineral mix—he thought. He couldn't read the foreign writing on the boxes.</p><p>Anyhow, he purchased big lots, packaged as ten thousand pills, each package going for about a hundred bucks American, and then he subdivided it into vials that resembled drugstore medicine bottles, thirty tablets to a bottle.</p><p>And they sold like there was no tomorrow.</p><p>Stan pondered and decided he'd at least go into the sales center with Mr. Hall to take a look around.</p><p>But on the day before the visit was scheduled, he discovered there really was no tomorrow. At least, not in Kansas.</p><hr/><p>They tracked him down through the TV station. When he'd made the infomercial, Stan was living in the low-rent motel. Now, three months later, he was all the way across town, in the Wheatfield Apartments.</p><p>Unfortunately for him, he hadn't changed his pseudonym—Nat Beechwood—and he had imprudently left a forwarding address.</p><p>It started just as he finished dressing that Friday morning. His phone rang, and when he answered it, a slightly panicky woman's voice said, "Mr. Beechwood, this is Delores at the front desk. And there are some people here to see you. Uh, in the lobby."</p><p>Oh, crap.</p><p>"Be right down," he said cheerfully.</p><p>And he went right down. Down the fire escape.</p><p>Unfortunately, they had staked out the underground garage.</p><p>"There he is!" shrieked a harridan voice. "That's Dr. Medicine!"</p><p>His first impression was that a circus must be in town, and all the hippos had escaped. Then he realized that four skinny women and four immense men, four hundred pounds each if an ounce, were closing in on him.</p><p>"Buddy weighs twice as much as he did three months ago!" shrieked Harridan 1.</p><p>"My Lou's gained fifty-five pounds!" yelled Harridan 2.</p><p>"Get him!" encouraged Harridan 3.</p><p>The guys were yelling, too, but their were so hefty and so out of breath that their angry shouts came out more like snorts and grunts.</p><p><em>Holy moley, I'm about to be ripped to ribbons by a bunch of human hogs</em>!</p><p>"Wotsa matter, ladies," he said, waving his hands and putting on an excruciatingly bad stage-Italian accent, "you make-a the mistake! I'm-a no doctor! Im-a Joe the barber! Pastafazoola!"</p><p>"The girl at the studio showed us your photo without makeup!" shot back Harridan 4.</p><p>"<em>Snort, greee, wowf</em>!" threatened the nearest wide load.</p><p>"The thing about that, see, is—bye!"</p><p>Stan leaped into the rental, started the engine, and roared out of the garage onto State Avenue, spotted more lumbering blimp-o's and their wives on the sidewalk, and violated most of the city driving rules until he had lost the pursuit—at least for the moment. He picked up the El Diablo at the storage garage, and on the way out of town, he stopped at a shopping-center branch of his bank to close his account.</p><p>"I'm sorry, sir," the teller said. "It looks as if your checking account has been frozen."</p><p>Oh, crap.</p><p>Stanley hauled out of Kansas City with only the five hundred bucks that had been in savings.</p><p>He sped for the border. Oklahoma would have to be better, he assured himself. Casino gambling, oil money, there'd be something even better for a grifter. Oh, yeah, baby.</p><p>Later, as he saw ahead the sign that told him he soon would not be in Kansas, Toto, Stan sighed. Goodbye, Josie, my little cupcake. So long, Thorny, you four-flushing traitor.</p><p>Farewell, chance at a straight job.</p><p>"Face it," he told himself. "You're a grifter, and grifting's what you gotta do. But, doggone it—who could've guessed that that Chinese stuff or whatever, that<em> Circe-iin nuuts undaa </em>vitamin stuff, would've fattened the porkers up instead of slimming them down?</p><p>"What the heck," he muttered. "They're rural American guys. Medicine or not, I shoulda known they'd make pigs of themselves."</p><hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Escape Impossible</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1971-1982)</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>9: Escape Impossible</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(Spring-autumn 1976)</em>
</p><p>Stanley might have been locked in a very small cave, stifling hot and stinking of motor oil. He had been there for at least a couple of hours, and thirst made his tongue an alien artifact carved from rough-textured wood. It had cracked his lips and wrung every drop of sweat from his skin.</p><p>But he wasn't giving up. The goons who'd tied his hands behind him had done a good job. He knew his wrists were bleeding, but sweat and blood were natural lubricants, and if he could just get this loop over his fingers, then things would loosen up and—</p><p>However, he also had to worry about the little matter of a firebomb. They'd cheerfully told him that by the time it went off, the goons would be out of Texas and safe in Louisiana, so he figured that meant four to five hours.</p><p>However, one of them had patted his cheek and said, "Don't worry, <em>pendejo</em>, you won't feel a thing. By the time the firebomb goes off, you'll be dead from the heat."</p><p>Because at that time he was gagged, Stan didn't reply. Probably just as well, because he had a desperate ace so far up his sleeve that he didn't know if he could reach it. The hoods were carrying out orders for their boss, he knew, but they were pretty dumb. They'd picked up the junker car from a seedy used-car lot that probably was a front for a drug operation or similar. But they'd picked exactly the wrong junker car.</p><p>That fact would avail him nothing unless he could free his hands. He had already squirmed and thrashed enough to get the gag out of his mouth, but he didn't waste time yelling. Nobody would hear him. He was pretty sure they'd driven to some desolate location.</p><p>No, if he could only get—aha! The loop slipped over his fingers, and the bond between his wrists was looser. He'd had no more than a quarter-inch play. Now he had maybe a couple inches. Enough, maybe. With his shoulder joints creaking and sending those little cartoon sketches of pain-bolts through his upper arms, Stan tried to ease his wrists down and over his butt. It hurt like hell, but it was his only chance.</p><p>Geeze, how did he wind up like this? His mind went back, all the way to January, when he'd come into Oklahoma with high hopes . . . .</p>
<hr/><p>The scam was the Oil Be Right There, a sure-fire instrument that would detect the presence of oil far below the surface. Basically a divining rod, it was in disguise as a modern electronic instrument.</p><p>Its basis was a set of old-fashioned bicycle handles—not the swoopy ones of a racing bike, but the 1950s kind, the café-style ones, and these were made for quite young riders—they'd suit a six-year-old. These were attached to a round black plastic box that housed a compartment for a nine-volt battery. From the front of this protruded a telescoping radio antenna, extending from six to fourteen inches. The top of the box featured three lights, red, amber, and green. Green told you that you were standing on top of an oil deposit.</p><p>There were some transistors and resistors and junk inside the box, too. The key component was a randomizer. Seventy-five per cent of the time, the red light would blink. Twenty-four per cent of the time, the amber one would blink instead. And just one per cent of the time—a maximum of 36 seconds in an hour—the green one would light up. About ever hundred times that happened, a small speaker would make a <em>woop! woop!</em> sound, like Curly Howard lying on his elbow and spinning in a circle on the ground. That, the customer understood, meant hat there was not only natural oil under the surface, but it was reachable by only moderate drilling.</p><p>It was about as useful for finding oil as being blindfolded, spun around twenty times, and then shooting an arrow into the air. Your chances of striking oil by either method were just about even.</p><p>For his infomercials, this time Stan was Rocky Joshua, a grizzled prospector with a deep tan (thanks to Max Factor Tan 2 pancake makeup) and an eyepatch over his left eye—the same eyepatch that Mr. Pinter had tucked into his pocket after the fracas with the mug who'd come to beat him down. He wore a red bandana around his neck, a fringed buckskin jacket, dusty jeans, and cowboy boots.</p><p>In character, Stan boisterously identified himself: "Howdy, folks, I'm Rocky Joshua, prospector. Now, I used to find these—gold nuggets, see?" He held out a palm with five pigeon-egg-sized gold (painted) rocks. "Shucks, though, it's hard work findin' these. So forget 'em!"</p><p>He tossed the rocks away and produced his device. "Now I prospect for black gold! Oil, that is! And I use the Stanco Oil Be Right There detector! You seen guys using metal detectors, right? Well, this here uses the same principles to find oil! It's only $99.99. That's cheap at the price, because one gusher will make you a millionaire! Take a gander at my vacation shack!"</p><p>The photo displayed was actually of the Biltmore House, a 250-room mansion in North Carolina. Stan figured it was far enough away that few Oklahomans would recognize it.</p><p>"Now since I made my pile," Stan continued, "I figger it's time to spread the wealth. That's how come I arranged with Stanco, Inc. to market my oil-finder, the Oil Be Right There, for only $99.99. But y'all better act fast! When these little beauties start showin' up in prospector's hands, that there oil is gonna be goin', goin', gone! Finding oil useta be a matter of luck. But I upped my luck with technology! Don't miss out! Up yours, too!"</p><p>And it sold—not in the millions, but anyway in the hundreds. Stan's user's guide, included with every Oil Be Right There, explained that just locating oil wasn't the end point. "Once you make your find," the manual advised, "secure the sources of an experienced drilling company to exploit it." However, it said not a word about how to go about doing this, or about how to deal with pesky problems like not owning mineral rights.</p><p>However, Stan was riding a wave, because as he had suspected, prospectors were filled with unlimited optimism. They'd stick to their search come hell, high water, or hellishly high water, or watery high hell. And no matter how many times they failed, they'd remain certain that real soon now, they'd make the big strike and their ship would come in, fortune would smile on them, they'd strike it rich, and maybe even invent some new clichés. You never can tell.</p><p>For every ten Oil Be Right There oil detectors Stan sold, he grossed a thousand bucks. In a little more than three months, he'd sold sixty-three, for an income of $6299.00. That worked out to the equivalent a monthly salary of about two thousand. That really wasn't too bad, close to the median American income. Of course that was gross. He had expenses. True, since Rocky Joshua did not exist, he didn't pay income taxes, so there was a big saving right there.</p><p>Came a day in May when Stanley learned that some busybody had dissected an Oil Be Right There and discovered its random nature. He learned there was a warrant out for Rocky, so Rocky evaporated and Stan lit out for Texas with a little stock of money in his pockets.</p><p>He hadn't spoken to Eddie Pinter in years now, but he had twice drawn on the ten-thousand-dollar account. His balance hovered now just above six thousand, and Stan stubbornly hoped to avoid dipping into it again until he faced complete poverty. And by now, he thought he could find means of avoiding that.</p><p>Texas had lots of rich people. Some of them were old money—not as many as he would have thought, but some. The majority were nouveaux riche, which was a fancy French term for not yet used to handling large sums of money. In Amarillo, Stan found a more or less legit job for a short period, selling land for a real-estate company. He was good at it—people liked his friendly jokey way of encouraging them to snap up this acreage because any day now a big company was gonna want it, and they'd pay practically any price.</p><p>So lots of trusting folks bought lots of ten acres each that offered nondescript flat prairie and no water source anywhere near. And while it was true that eventually the land would have value and could even be developed as subdivisions, that time was still about fifty years off.</p><p>The real-estate office liked Stan's work. He operated on commission and earned a pretty fair income, but eventually he soured on it. It was just that so many of his clients were families, with little kids, hopeful for the future, and Stan knew full well that no big company was likely to show up eager to pay quadruple, quintuple, or ten times the value of their land.</p><p>On one hand, he never stretched the buyers' resources. He didn't strain them until they risked everything. But on the other hand, he never did them any favors as far as increasing their true wealth went. And to see their hopeful faces, and see how impressed the six- and eight-year-old kids were that, wow, they now owned all this, well—</p><p>One day he showed up at the office, collected what was due to him, and said, "Time for me to be movin' along."</p><p>One thing about Texas, you can move along for quite a ways without running out of Texas. And he had a cushion of money to consider for a while. He rambled on to Dallas-Fort Worth and found an affordable and not too run-down motel where he could just stop and ponder and plan for a few days.</p><p>Reflecting on what had passed between May of 1971 and May of 1976, he saw ups and downs. The biggest up, he thought, was helping out that poor kid George Milton. It made him feel good, like he'd saved George from falling into, well, the lows. The times he'd been seventy-five cents away from going hungry, the times when he'd cheated somebody who, just maybe, didn't deserve to be cheated.</p><p>He got so lonely that one evening he made a long-distance call to Glass Shard Beach, just to touch bases with somebody who knew him.</p><p>Vinnie answered. "Hiya, Cuz," Stan said, trying to sound hearty. "How's it hangin'?"</p><p>"Stanley?" Vinnie yelped. Then he laughed. "Oh, my God, Stanley! What happened to you? We all thought you'd dropped off the face of the earth!"</p><p>"Nah," Stan said. "I been travelin' a little. Stopping now and then to make some money, then traveling on. I'm out West now, kinda. Hey, Vinnie, any news from my folks?"</p><p>"Same old same old," Vinnie said. "Shermy and Mona are out there in California, San Francisco area. They get back out here once a year. You should see the kid. He's gonna be a smart guy! Your mom and dad are doin' fine. Pawn business has picked up, this damn recession and all, and your mom's still running the phone psychic scam. They're doing OK."</p><p>"How about Ford?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Oh, he graduated. He went through the whole program in like three years! And then he went on to get like three doctor's degrees."</p><p>"He's a doctor?" Stan asked, surprised.</p><p>"Not a real doctor. A what do you call it, a Ph.D. doctor. He's got one in physics and one in chemistry I think, and another one in history! He broke all kinds of records. And he got a huge grant of money to study some more. He's moving out west, too, like Shermy. Maybe he already has. I think he's going to some little burg in Oregon."</p><p>"No kidding?" Stan asked.</p><p>They spent nearly an hour catching up. It cost Stan a pretty penny. But when Vinnie asked, "So when you comin' home again, Stanley?"</p><p>"Not for a long time," Stan said. "I still gotta earn a million dollars."</p><p>"Aw, Stan," Vinnie said. "Maybe your dad's over that."</p><p>"You think so?" Stan asked flatly.</p><p>After a long pause, Vinnie admitted, "No."</p><p>"Yeah. I won't see you anytime soon, Vinnie. Hey, I'll drop you a postcard from time to time, tell you where I'm staying. You can let me know any vital family news."</p><p>"Sure, Stan, but—"</p><p>"Gotta go now," Stan said firmly. "Got a deal cooking."</p><p>Only he hadn't.</p>
<hr/><p>No casinos in Texas, but plenty of informal card games and even tournaments. In upscale parts of Amarillo and Dallas and Houston and so on, a man so inclined could even take a seat at bridge tables. Stan kept away from those. But other games—Hold 'Em, which was not his favorite game, seven-card stud, five-card stud, even variants like Casino, you could find any of them if you were discreet and careful and looked.</p><p>Stan was not a card shark. Not yet, anyway. However, he was putting into practice the things he had learned from a few pros along the way. He had become especially good at reading tells—those little, twitchy, involuntary, unconscious movements that virtually every player made. They spoke worlds to a careful observer. This guy has three of a kind or better, judging from the way his eyes dart down toward his hand, onetwothree glances just like that every time.</p><p>That fellow in the green jacket—never trust a guy in a green jacket, he's got money on his mind—has a habit of running his tongue around inside his closed mouth just before bluffing big. When the too-skinny, tough-talking woman closes her eyes and draws a breath, she's got a fair hand but will fold if you raise her by more than table minimum.</p><p>Some people had impervious poker faces. You just glide over them, look for better pickings. Stan didn't become a regular at any table—he drifted from game to game, from town to town. He had developed a repertoire of tells. He'd drum his fingers twice before bluffing, then lose a small bet. Maybe do that twice. Then when he had a nice fat flush in hearts, he'd do it again and hesitantly bet, and the guys who thought they had him pegged would raise and raise until he'd turn over the cards and take a nice pot.</p><p>Stan was getting progressively more skillful. Some nights he lost a little, other nights he made modest profits. Whenever he made a big score—in his league, that meant a thousand dollars or more—he left that geographical area and headed on. It brought in about as much as his best sales runs had, and he figured that at least he wouldn't get in trouble this way. No customers to complain, no federal or state agencies to get interested.</p><p>Sure, the local law-enforcement guys could be a problem, except the guys who ran the games were the types who paid for protection. It crossed Stan's mind that he was contributing to the delinquency of cops and sheriffs, but he had no criminal record under his own name or under any of the others, including the current Texas one (Silas Beaumont). True, a good many agencies from a great many states would just love to have the pleasure of Stan's company, and if their wishes ever came true, he'd probably earn a rap sheet as long as the road back to Glass Shard Beach.</p><p>On the other hand, just as Stan had learned to avoid tipping his hand at the poker table, he had also learned how to keep a low street profile. A few months passed as Stan built up a moderately healthy stash of cash.</p><p>One thing he had learned from occasional gambling was that every lucky streak sooner or later faded, or sometimes just flat turned and went the other way. He was starting to think of getting out of Texas—though the size of the state makes it difficult to get out with any alacrity unless you're willing to board a jet and take off.</p><p>Stan had never flown in his life and didn't ever expect to. Betting money on pasteboard squares with funny little pictures on them was one thing. Betting his life on a big aluminum tube with wings seemed riskier, somehow.</p><p>Anyways, Lady Luck sidled up to him one late-July day in Houston and murmured some sweet words about a poker gathering in San Antonio. Good old San Antone, where Sam Houston and Davy Crockett had bet their lives on the Republic of Texas and had lost big time. Right there in the shadow of the Alamo, about a hundred good old boys were gonna gather and see who could win money off who. Stan knew a few, had heard of more. A family group of them, the Mulcars, daddy and three sons, were big players, busted out once every summer.</p><p>The rest of the year, they, well, they imported herbs and questionable pharmaceuticals and sold them for outrageous prices. And as a state, Texas was pretty indulgent about issues of firearms. Just about every good old boy in the state owned at least a shotgun, and many of them owned an assortment of handguns.</p><p>The Mulcars, it was said, habitually packed heat. Stan wouldn't bet against four armed guys who he suspected of signaling each other whenever they acted like one of them had a hand full of aces, and he wouldn't care to cross them if they tried to muscle him.</p><p>The Mulcars were going to be in San Antonio, but there would be at least five tables going, and he could choose not to sit at one with any of them. The money was tempting. Word was that the games would range from Hold 'Em to Omaha Pot Limit to five- or seven-card stud. He'd leave the first two for the high-rollers. He'd try his luck with the stud players. Hold 'Em and Omaha were fast-paced games, but as far as Stan was concerned, slow and studly wins the pot. Better a well-to-do tortoise than a skinned rabbit.</p><p>He rolled into San Antonio with a well-stuffed wallet, heavy on the hundreds and the fifties, but as was his habit, he chose a run-down dump of a motel, over in the Westwood District. He told the guy at the check-in counter that all he wanted was a clean bed and working air-conditioning. He got both, though the AC unit sounded like a metal trashcan welded shut and containing fifty empty tin cans rolling down an endless up escalator.</p><p>That's why earplugs were invented, though.</p><p>The impromptu casino could only be approached through a Tex-Mex bar and grill. You went out the rear door, through a smelly alley, into the rear door of an abandoned warehouse, and into a room big enough to host a rural carnival and nearly tall enough to accommodate a Ferris wheel.</p><p>Bare though the huge place was, it managed a little bit of casino ambience. Scattered floor lamps provided pools of illumination, most of it focused on the card tables. For variety's sake, they had also set up one roulette wheel and two craps tables. A temporary bar ran along the same wall that the rear door led into.</p><p>Stan had heard that the cops were fixed. When he saw that two guards stood duty and that both of them wore stars on their chests, he decided this game would not be raided. He got there early, and the card games had not begun, though some guys were shooting dice. Stan joined them, testing his luck.</p><p>It was average. After nearly an hour, Stan left the game twenty bucks ahead of where he'd started. Slow and steady, man, slow and steady.</p><p>By then a Hold 'Em game had begun at one table, a five-card stud game at another. Stan kibitzed at the Hold 'Em table, and a fellow onlooker pointed out the four Mulcars. Big Buck was the daddy, rotund of figure and broad of (red) face. With his wispy white hair and tufty white eyebrows, he might have been a genial Southern politician, all squinty grin and head-thrown-back laughter, until you looked at the ice-chip blue eyes, like two marbles pushed down in a wad of dough. They were eyes that could look at murder and see just a means of solving an annoying problem.</p><p>Junior, who was maybe 35, had a square head and sideburns that ran halfway down to his chin. He wore a permanent frown and arms full of intricate tattoos. During play, he scowled at his opponents, as if intimidating them by sheer will.</p><p>Bonny, despite his feminine-sounding name, was a plump guy of 32, a soft, bulgy, guy with the features of a melting snowman and the figure of the Michelin Man. He played the game as if it were for fun and not for money. Yet Stan had heard that old Bonny was the lead hitman of the family. He favored the garrote, the choking wire, and it was said that he giggled as the victim kicked and died.</p><p>Little Bo, at twenty-five the youngest, looked like a college basketball player gone somewhat to seed. He was tall, rangy, with a growing pot belly, and a sour loser and an arrogant winner.</p><p>When all four Mulcars were in the same game, inevitably one of them wound up taking the pot. At some point in the contest, the other players sensed it was more expedient for them to fold. The Mulcars didn't expressly say "Your money or your life": aloud, but that was the clear implication.</p><p>What the hell. Stan spent the entire evening at the makeshift casino, all of it either at the craps table or playing five-card stud. So it was along about three in the morning, and maybe he was a little tired. Not drunk—he'd had one gin-and-tonic early on, and followed that with refills of club soda in the same glass, with the same tired wedge of lime. The unobservant would think that he was nibbling gin drinks all evening. He acted high, grinning and scowling as he raked in a pot or lost.</p><p>Where he pushed his luck was going ahead with his strategy after Little Bo took a seat at the same table. Early in the game, Stan bluffed on a busted flush and pulled in a small pot, couple of hundred. The two losers who'd hung in cursed as they saw the run of four clubs and the one intruding spade.</p><p>Stan had carefully shown his bluff tell. And he knew that the others, or at least some of them, had picked up on it. As the pots grew, he played along at about an average level, breaking even. Then he got a hot hand, a very good though not unbeatable hand: Full house, kings over aces. As the betting escalated, he showed them the bluff tell again and squirmed a little. But he kept raising.</p><p>So did Little Bo. However, Bo had his own tell—when he had a good hand, he tapped the cards he held with his forefinger. Three taps. When he had a really good hand, he shifted his grip, holding the cards so you couldn't see the top edge, just the bottom edge, of his five tickets. He had tapped this time.</p><p>Showdown was imminent when Little Bo, staring straight at a sweaty Stan, grinned. "You're bluffing, you sumbitch," the Texan drawled. "I rase five thousand. You in or out?"</p><p>"I'll call," Stan said, pushing the chips across the table.</p><p>With a triumphant grin, Little Bo laid down his hand: three Jacks. Two tens. "Full house, sucker. I think this little ol' pile belongs to me."</p><p>"Ah-ah," Stan said. "My house is a little bit fuller than y'all's, I do believe."</p><p>He cashed out and headed out. And somehow the Mulcars got to the bar door before he did, and in the slow Texas pre-dawn morning, they jumped him and hog-tied him. Little Bo himself had giggled as he slugged Stan asleep.</p><p>The next thing he knew, he was being stuffed into a very small car trunk, his hands firmly lashed behind him. He didn't recognize the two brutish guys who were handling him like a sack of grain, but just before slamming the trunk lid, the uglier of the two had patted Stan's cheek paternally. "Don't worry, <em>pendejo</em>, you won't feel a thing. By the time the firebomb goes off, you'll be dead from the heat."</p>
<hr/><p>How much time did he have left? Speed was essential. With the loop of rope pulled loose, he had just enough play, barely, to pull his wrists down past his butt, past his bent legs, to his heels, and then over his heels—and then his hands were in front of him.</p><p>He got the ropes up to his mouth.</p><p>With no other alternative, Stan began to chew. If he could only bite through all the fibers—the car was in his favor. But he had to get through the rope before he could do anything with that small advantage.</p><p>Pull three or four strands out with his teeth. Bite. Bite, Bite. Snip. Three more. Three more. Three more. Just keep chewing. Slow, steady, chew, chew.</p><p>Lady Luck, the selfish broad, gave him one tiny blessing. When he chewed through that loop, he could twist his wrists and feel his bonds loosening.</p><p>
  <em>Must be a hundred and twenty degrees.</em>
</p><p>The timer must be counting down to ignition. Where were the hands on its clock? How much margin did he have? Seconds? Ten, nine, eight, seven? Or did he have minutes? An hour, even?</p><p>Twist, twist. Grab that loop with his teeth. Short jerks. Now. Now. Now!</p><p>He got his left hand free. Now squirm over to his right side, rope still dangling from his numb right wrist. Feel. Feel. They were up here somewheres.</p><p>Aha.</p><p>One feature of the 1966 Barracuda was a fold-down rear seat. And there was one latch, and there was another—shove with his shoulder—</p><p>The seat went down, and the trunk was now twice as big, under the largest rear window any American car ever had, sunlight hot through it. The Barracuda was a two-door. Squirm forward—uh-oh.</p><p>The nasty little surprise, timer and sticks of what probably were magnesium and a quart bottle of gas or some other accelerant, the homemade firebomb was sitting right in the driver's seat. Cut the red wire or the green wire? Hell with it. Just pick up the whole thing and throw it as far as you can. It smashes on the rocky hillside.</p><p>His head was spinning, but he inspected the car. They had to have driven it here. No key in it, but he knew how to hotwire a car. He tried, and the engine caught, clattering as if it were in terminal decline. Over a quarter of a tank of gas. He jockeyed the car around. It handled poorly, as though the tires were low and mushy.</p><p>The goons had driven the 'Cuda down a dirt road, hardly a scrape in the sandy soil. Only way there, so it had to be the only way back. The suspension was gone, and the car bucketed along, but it rolled. He had gone about half a mile when he heard a distant <em>whump!</em></p><p>Afew moments later a rising black mushroom of boiling smoke showed in the rearview.</p><p>
  <em>Beat the firebomb by that much. Thank you, Lady Luck. And by the way, I suppose you didn't think to leave me my wallet.</em>
</p><p>No, of course not.</p><p>Lordy, ole buddy, look-a there. A sunbaked asphalt road. From the shadows, he guessed the dirt road had led eastward, so turn . . . <em>damn, my head's aching . . . </em> turn left, that would be north.</p><p>In ten miles he saw no other vehicles. Then a four-way intersection, and across the east-west highway the asphalt road broadened out, and, wow, there was a little gas station on the right. <em>Petróleo Superior, </em>the sign said, had the goons driven him into Mexico?</p><p>He pulled up to the two pumps under the <em>GASOLINE</em> sign. Not far away was a lone <em>DIESEL </em>pump.</p><p>Stan had to unfasten his belt and reach down inside his pants and into his shorts. They'd taken his wallet, but they had not stripped him. There they were, three hundreds, two fifties, five twenties, where he'd stashed them during a bathroom break.</p><p>
  <em>Damn, I had fourteen thousand in the wallet.</em>
</p><p>Easy come, easy go.</p><p>He tucked the damp bills into his left front pocket and went into the station. A radio that had once been ivory and now was a mottled black and gray was playing a tinny mono version of "Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song" by a Spanish-accented vocalist. A black-haired teen girl behind bars was chewing gum and reading a magazine.</p><p>Stan took a two-liter bottle of water to the cashier, put down a twenty, and drank half of it before his mouth felt damp enough for him to speak. "Gonna get ten bucks worth of gas," he said. "Regular."</p><p>"Out of regular," the girl said. "It'll have to be high-test or nothing."</p><p>Stan took his change and pulled a twenty out of his pocket. "Twenty, then," he said. "How far to San Antonio?"</p><p>The girl blinked. "I dunno. Three, four hours."</p><p>So he bought a map, and she showed him where they were on it.</p><p>The Barracuda tank held eighteen gallons. When it was full, Stan had pumped just $15.04 worth of high-test gas into it. He did not go into the station for his change. Air was free, and he pumped enough into the bald tires to make them a little less squashy.</p><p>He studied the map and then headed north until he hit highway 57, then turned east. The poor old half-rusted-out Barracuda chugged and gasped as if it were about to die. But somehow or other, it chattered and groaned as far as the cheap motel, reaching it around five in the afternoon.</p><p>The goons had not taken his keys or his car. Stan packed, settled up at the front desk—nobody commented on his swollen hands or bloody wrists or black eye—and from the secret compartment in his carry-on bag, he picked out a pretty convincing passport and driver's license in the name Piers Stanley. He'd decided it might be good to go for a little vacation. He drove to a small town, found a cheap motel—again—and from a street-corner pay phone, he called Irving back East. "I need to draw on that account," Stan said. "And please don't ask me for a receipt, not right now. It's urgent. And one more request. Write down this phone number."</p><p>Western Union took care of the money transfer. However, Stan didn't rush to the local office to collect the cash. Instead, he hung out near the phone booth for an hour. When the phone rang, he answered it. "Pines?" the voice on the other end asked.</p><p>"Yeah. Is Mr. P. available?"</p><p>"Who?"</p><p>Stan took a deep breath. "Pinky."</p><p>"He's in the room, but for reasons he can't speak to you direct. Can I take a message?"</p><p>Stan said, "Texas. A family of bad men. Name of Mulcar, out of Dallas-Fort Worth. Somebody needs to teach them a lesson or two about how to be polite to a stranger."</p><p>"I'll relay the message," the guy said. "From Mr. P, good luck."</p><p>"Yeah, I'll need it," Stan said.</p><p>Months later, down in Old Mexico, Stan made a habit of buying an American newspaper out of Dallas-Fort Worth. One morning he read a big front-page story: MULCAR FATHER, SONS, BATTLE COPS. Two of the boys survived the gunfight and were under arrest and in the hospital. The dad and the middle son . . . not so lucky.</p><p>Stan didn't feel exultant. At least he would be safe, going back to the USA. First, though, he needed a bigger stake, and he had found a little job to do that would fatten his new wallet.</p><p>It was simple. All he had to do was deliver a package to an American who had once lived down in Colombia. It should take a week.</p><p>Not close to two years.</p>
<hr/>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. The Land of the Dead</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1971-1982)</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>10: The Land of the Dead</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(Winter 1976-spring 1979)</em>
</p><p>First, absolutely no—and let's be perfectly clear about this—no illegal drugs were involved anywhere along the way. When Estéban Piños first stepped off the airliner when it landed on the Cartagena tarmac two days after Christmas, 1976, the plan as he understood it was simple.</p><p>Meet a guy named Jorge Gomez, who wore an eyepatch over his right eye and was a few inches shorter, a few pounds heavier, and a few years older than Stan. He spoke excellent English, though he was a native of Colombia, and he took Stan to a house on a hillside, a small bungalow that at least had a gasoline-powered generator and air conditioning.</p><p>"So I'm supposed to pick up a locked box, promise not to look into it, and then fly back to the States on a diplomatic passport, right?" Stan asked.</p><p>Jorge, who had been genial when they first met and then gradually over the next days became increasingly taciturn and grumpy, stared at him. "How many times do we have to repeat this?" he asked.</p><p>"Just askin'," Stan said.</p><p>"Yes. That is what you have to do."</p><p>"And what's in the box—"</p><p>"Is of no concern to you," Jorge said. "You go with me to pick up the box. My chief hands you the passport and papers you will need. There will be a diplomatic pouch. You will board an airplane that will fly to Los Angeles, California. There a man will meet you and take from you the pouch. In return, he will give you five thousand American dollars—"</p><p>"In unmarked bills," Stan said.</p><p>"—yes, in untraceable American currency, new banknotes. And then your mission will be complete. That is all."</p><p>"OK," Stan said. "I think I got it, but the flying part, is there any way I could maybe take a ship or something?"</p><p>"No. It only works if you fly. You flew here from Texas. What is wrong with flying?"</p><p>"It scares the bejeebers outa me," Stan confessed.</p><p>They were drinking small cups of strong coffee. Jorge stared at him for a long time. "You must have the <em>valor, </em>you understand, the, um, the courage, to do what you must. I thought that was clear."</p><p>"Oh, yeah, I can do that, I got the <em>valor</em>, right? So when does this happen?"</p><p>"In a few days' time."</p><p>The next few days were a round of nonstop edge-of-the seat action—criminal deals, police ambushes, car chases, a flaming wreck in the jungle, snakebites, delirium, a hairbreadth rescue—</p><p>On TV. Jorge stayed away all day, every day, and Stan sat and watched television. Most of the programs were in <em>español muy rápido</em>, and although he had learned some rudiments of the language in Mexico, Stan grasped only a word here and there. Some of the comedy shows had enough slapstick for him to get the point of a bucket of white paint poured over the head of the fat guy, or the little guy who sat on a tack, or the kids pursued by bees.</p><p>The action was mainly in American movies. They had been subtitled in Spanish, but the dialogue was still English. In between TV shows, Stan nuked frozen dinners, drank coffee, and worked out in the weight room. And waited. In parting, Jorge had said, "I will return when it is time."</p><p>"How long will that be?" Stan had asked.</p><p>"From now until when I return."</p><p>Stan frankly lost count. It was more than three days, less than a full week. Finally, though, he heard a car chugging up the hillside. It was a dented red Renault 4, the same boxy vehicle that Jorge had driven when he first brought Stan to the house. Jorge came inside, they had dinner, and when twilight had become full night, "Come," Jorge said.</p><p>The thing about the drive was that the first ten miles or so were along a road that barely existed. The bungalow, near the crest of a hill, was heavily camouflaged, probably all but invisible from the air. The scrape of a trail led through dense forest that overarched the narrow dirt lane. The trip was slow, because Jorge did not turn on the headlights for far too long. Finally, though, he turned them on, and then Stan saw that the dirt road intersected a paved highway. A bus rolled past, white and with <em>Costa Line </em>painted on the side.</p><p>"Where are we?" Stan asked.</p><p>"Be patient."</p><p>If there was a city limit sign identifying the town they entered, the government must have disguised it as a bush. It was not a rich town. The buildings were one-storied, ramshackle, windowless structures, roofed with badly rusted corrugated sheet metal. There were no streetlights, and the few streets seemed laid out in a deliberate maze.</p><p>Jorge drove down a narrow street—probably one-way, but maybe not, because it came to a dead end. What looked like a wall with a faded hand-painted sign—Stan could only make out one word, <em>Reparación—</em>rolled up. It was probably the only remote-operated garage door in the whole town.</p><p>Jorge parked inside the garage, killed the headlights, and outside one dim overhead light came on. Jorge and Stan got out. From a dark office another man walked out. More muscular than Jorge, though about the same height, he had a heavy five o'clock shadow, jet black hair, and wore a tan linen suit. He spoke to Jorge in Spanish. Jorge replied. They laughed. Then the guy in the suit spoke to Stan. His English was heavily accented and hard to understand: "So you are the <em>mensajero, </em>the—" he glanced at Jorge for help.</p><p>"The courier," Jorge replied.</p><p>"Yes," Stan said. "Uh, <em>sí."</em></p><p>"My name is Rico. You are Estéban. Come now. You will do only what is told."</p><p>"OK," Stan said.</p><p>The backseat of the Renault was incredibly cramped for a man of Stan's size.</p><p>He dozed during the long, jouncing drive. When he woke, it was earliest morning, and the car was parked on a paved street. Rico was at the wheel, wearing huge sunglasses and a fatigue cap pulled low. "You go with Jorge," he said. "Do what he tells."</p><p>They walked around the block. No one was stirring, but a long-horned cow mooched along the street and stared at them curiously as they passed her. They came to a reinforced metal door, and Jorge used three keys to open three separate locks. "Inside," he said.</p><p>They entered—and faced a wide-shouldered, middle-aged guy armed with a brace of semi-automatic pistols. Jorge and the guard exchanged something in low, rapid Spanish. Then the guard beckoned and led them back to an inner door with a keypad. He punched in a number. Jorge said to Stan, "Wait here."</p><p>Stan stood and looked around the room. It was, basically, a bare concrete-block corridor, maybe eight feet wide and twelve long. No decorations. Nothing visible except a light switch on the wall just inside the outer door.</p><p>The inner door opened suddenly, surprising him. Jorge stepped out and held out a handgun. "Take this. If anyone comes through the front door, shoot."</p><p>"Wait, what?" Stan asked. Through the open inner door, he could see the guard lying on the floor, both holsters empty. "Did you—"</p><p>"He's unconscious only. Stand here and if the door opens—"</p><p>"OK," Stan said, wondering how soon he could run for it.</p><p>He didn't have time to decide. Jorge reappeared, clutching a box about the size of a fat paperback book. "I have them. Quickly."</p><p>He took the pistol from Stan. They left the building, Jorge said, "Back to the automobile. Don't run."</p><p>Rico still sat at the wheel. He started the engine even before Jorge and Stan got into the car. Stan wondered, but did not dare ask, what he had landed in.</p><p>They drove for hours. Then in Cartagena, and not far from the airport, Rico told Stan, "You will accompany me."</p><p>He led Stan into what might have been a shop, except the left wall was lined with lockboxes, like oversized mailboxes. Rico unlocked number 618, put the box inside, closed it, and locked it. He held up the key. "Watch."</p><p>An incurious man sat behind a counter at the end of the long room. Rico gave him a slip of paper, and the man went into a back room. Rico put a small wad of putty, or something like putty, on the key to locker 618, and he stuck it to the underside of the counter.</p><p>Just as he did, the attendant came back holding three envelopes. He handed them over, and Rico and Stan left.</p><p>In the car, Rico said, "When it is safe, you will receive a—" he glanced at Jorge.</p><p>"A call ticket?" Jorge said. "A receipt. One to give the attendant so he will retrieve any mail."</p><p>"Yes," Rico agreed. "Retrieve the key. Open the—<em>compartimento? </em>The storage box? And retrieve the package. You will place it in the diplomatic pouch. From there you fly to Los Angeles. There I meet you. I get pouch, you get money. You leave <em>mañana</em>."</p><p>By that time, Stanley was so worried and—face it—so scared that he didn't even want to talk. If Rico's plan had gone as intended, he would have been back in the USA by Wednesday, January 18, 1978.</p><p>Unfortunately, within the hour two vehicles crowded with <em>Policía Nacional</em> forces cut them off. Jorge just had time to tell Stanley, "Admit nothing" before they were arrested.</p>
<hr/><p>Technically, Rio Verde was not the worst prison in Colombia. However, it was far from the best.</p><p>Technically, Jorge, Rico, and Stanley were not tried and sentenced. They were being held until arraignment and trial.</p><p>Jorge explained that might take a while.</p><p>One month later, Rico was freed. "He has what do you say, contacts," Jorge said. "Now he will arrange for our release."</p><p>Twenty-five months after that, Jorge and Stanley still shared the cell, and still waited word of when they might be tried. Then one day Jorge asked for permission to be taken to a dentist for emergency attention. After only a week, word came down that he would be transported to the dentist the next day. He smiled in a grim way as he told Stan, "<em>Adiós</em>,<em> Gringo</em>. I believe now you will remain here, in the land of the dead."</p><p>Stan pulled a dumb face, but he thought, <em>Jorge's got an escape plan, and it involves the dentist. </em>He thought long and hard about that. This marked his third spell behind bars--the first in Missouri, but that was only three days before he bailed out and then jumped bail. Then back in Mexico, he got sent to the slammer, el slammo, whatever they called it there, for close to a week before he got wise and offered to pay whatever fine he owed directly to the jailer. The fine came to the cash he had on hand. But no opportunity to shorten this third stretch had come up. Yet. The thought of Jorge getting away and himself being stuck for who knew how many years made Stan absolutely sick.</p><p>The next morning guards came, unlocked the cell and carried an unconscious Stanley Pines to the infirmary. Half an hour after that, two outside guards cane and took Jorge with them. Jorge didn't say much, and they drove him to a building, accompanied him upstairs, and to an office on the second floor.</p><p>The dentist ushered him into the examination room. He checked a paper: Long hair, orange prison jumpsuit, prisoner number 811 S.</p><p>In Spanish, the dentist said, "The Vespa is outside. Here is an envelope with the money. Quickly, change into these clothes. Strike me hard enough to leave a bruise. The rope is in the window. When you are out, discard the prison clothing."</p><p>Stan obliged. Jorge was a nice enough guy, but he probably shouldn't have told his cellmate about the way he was going to escape and leave the gringo, whom he despised, to take the whole rap. Of course, Jorge thought Stan couldn't understand any Spanish. The truth was he understood just enough.</p><p>With his right hand aching from having punched both Jorge and the dentist, Stan let himself out of the window and slid down the rope. In a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, without the eyepatch, Stan hoped he could go unrecognized for at least a few hours.</p><p>He drove through broiling-hot streets, asked directions in passable but not fluent Spanish, and found the mail drop place. At the counter, he discovered the key, still there.</p><p>He opened the compartment. He took the pouch, left the box. Inside the pouch was an envelope containing an undated, official-looking document and credentials that identified him as a U.S. Embassy attaché.</p><p>Grimacing at the thought of what lay ahead, he found his way to the airport, produced his credentials in the Customs office, and received a ticket to Los Angeles. He barely boarded the plane in time.</p><p>In Los Angeles, he bypassed the Customs people altogether. He was supposed to meet a representative of the CIA, but he dodged that, too. He changed the Colombian pesos for American money—not much more than seven hundred dollars.</p><p>At about the same time that Jorge woke up in the prison infirmary and insisted that, no matter what the prisoner number on his jumpsuit showed, he was really Jorge Gomez, and if you didn't believe that, just examine his right eye—</p><p>The national police realized that the prisoner who had escaped from custody in the dentist's office was not Gomez, but one Estéban Piños, either an American or an expatriate from there or Canada, living in Mexico. A high alert went out to all forces.</p><p>However, such alerts were common in Columbia—literally dozens went out every day. And despite the priority alert, among the police it was believed that everything went back to the theft of a handful of emeralds, not drugs. And nobody had been killed. And Rico did have high-up connections and once he had been freed, he had gone away, into exile in the United States, where he had a long-term visa.</p><p>So as far as the missing gringo was concerned, they thought there could be no hurry. No hurry at all.</p>
<hr/><p>Stan had left a cache of ID papers and a little traveling money in Dallas-Fort Worth. He had enough cash to get that far, and once in Texas, he had retrieved his emergency funds along with a passport and driver's license in the name Hal Forrester. That allowed him to buy a cheap used car ($400 cash) and drive down to Mexico, where he had more money stashed. He sold the used car, reclaimed the Stanleymobile, and drove back through Texas.</p><p>With only a thin margin of cash, with not that much remaining in his fallback fund, Stanley Pines headed for the state where he figured he might just beat the odds.</p><p>The month and year were March 1979.</p><p>His destination was Las Vegas, Nevada.</p>
<hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Scylla, Meet Charybdis</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1971-1982)</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>11: Scylla, Meet Charybdis</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1979-1981)</em>
</p><p>Wearing a white crown-creased Cattleman's Special cowboy hat and intricately tooled high-heeled riding boots, Stan took on the name Stetson Pinefield for his time in Nevada.</p><p>He deliberately walked a little bowlegged. He casually called strangers "Partner," or sometimes "Pilgrim." Instead of walking, he moseyed. Instead of estimating, he reckoned. Instead of swearing, he aw-shucksed. Instead of laughing when something good happened, he said, "Ye-haw!"</p><p>The downside was that no Nevadan in his right mind would believe, even for one instant, that Stan had ever sat tall in the saddle while riding the range roping dogies or branding cattle or throwing the bull—oh, wait, that last one they could believe, but only in a metaphorical sense.</p><p>The upside was that you can run into fifty guys exactly like that on any sidewalk in the state on any given day.</p><p>Once again, and by dingo, it was getting tiresome, Stan realized he had to start at the very bottom and work his slow way up. He also had to lay low and stay out Rico's sight. And stay on the alert for Jorge or other suspicious-looking characters.</p><p>And the downside of <em>that </em>was that in Nevada, you could drive down just about any street and see from fifty to a hundred suspicious-looking characters.</p><p>For Stan, the main thing was to remain way under the radar while he built up his cash reserves and got ready for the big time and the big games. Even then, he'd have to watch it if he had any hope of succeeding.</p><p>He'd heard that the casinos in Vegas monitored patrons closely. Small-timers didn't get noticed. High-rollers did. The delicate balance would be somewhere in the middle, a medium-roller, you might stay. A Schmoe who got lucky once and won a tidy little sum could walk away with his money and his life.</p><p>The high-roller who could win big, who could beat the house, and especially who would resist free drinks and other perks to entice him to another round at the tables—that kind of guy might wind up sun-dried in the desert. And with empty pockets.</p><p>From talking to other gamblers, you see, Stanley had learned that in certain casinos, a big winner would be surveilled on closed-circuit TV and marked for elimination. They might be given one chance—play another game and lose everything. At that, even if they stayed lucky for the game, they too often got real unlucky for life, real fast.</p><p>So for a few months Stan flew very low indeed. He was good enough with a cue to haunt pool halls. For him it was easy to pick up a couple of hundred from suckers, as long as he moved along to another pool hall on another street. He could quickly size up opponents and always cut his losses and dropped out of games where the competitor was making difficult shots or establishing long runs.</p><p>Stan had mastered the knack of playing below his skill level, by a little or a lot, making substandard play look completely natural while he calculated the moment so closely that at the last possible point in the game he could sink three balls and pull just far enough ahead to win. As his confidence grew, just before the coup de grace, when he was still behind, he could delicately suggest, "Care to double our wager? I think I'm getting the hang of this."</p><p>Most of all, since his ability to judge character had grown as his ability to trust others waned, he almost never misjudged a mark. Nine times out of ten, he won the pool game at the opportune time. Those tenth times, though—now and then they were chancy.</p><p>During the summer of his first year in Nevada—it was a small town outside of Reno named Chisholm Flats—Stan realized that he was up against a pool shark who'd been playing him. It was a dark, small joint, and they were playing at a time in the afternoon that was so lean, he and the other guy—Shades, his moniker was—were the only two at the pool table.</p><p>They took their time. The place smelled of cigar smoke and stale beer, the floor underfoot felt sticky. The only employee on duty sat at the bar, reading a hefty hardcover book, <em>The Stand</em>, his lips moving as he went through pages of apocalypse.</p><p>As their game hit the sweet spot, Stan deliberately missed a tricky shot, and across the table, Shades grinned and shifted his toothpick to the other corner of his mouth. "Nice playing with you, Stets," he said in a gravelly voice. Stan studied the layout and realized that Shades had the skill to sink three balls with one complex two-bank shot. Shades's rawboned face took on a look of cunning, his eyes behind his yellow sunglasses narrowing down to mean slits. "You ready to really play, man? Ready to see your money leave home for good?"</p><p>"Yeah," Stan said. "See, the thing about that is—"</p><p>And he whipped his cue around, holding onto the shaft and striking with the handle, cold-cocking Shades before he knew what was going on. The yellow sunglasses went flying, Shades yelped, the guy at the bar muttered, "Play nice now," and Stan grabbed the stakes and sprinted for the door.</p><p>He heard Shades cursing him and as he opened the door, a pool ball whizzed at his head. Stan registered it just in time and got his left hand up. The ball smacked it so hard that pain flashed all the way up his arm, and he was sure that at lest one bone had broken.</p><p>But he kept hold of the ball. Shades was on his feet, but evidently still dizzy, steadying himself with one hand on the table while he reached to his waistband with his free hand. Realizing he couldn't catch a bullet in his palm, Stanley scooted round the corner to the parking lot—surface lot, open to the broiling sun—and got into the oven-hot Stanleymobile before Shades made it to the sidewalk.</p><p>He took off and sped out of town and into the desert. Maybe Henderson would be a more welcoming town, he thought. For an hour he floored it, risking a traffic stop. His hand throbbed. He finally slowed down. The highway stretched flat and long, and he saw no sign of pursuit, either official or personal.</p><p>Stopping at a convenience store, he filled the tank and bought a box of aspirin, a bottle of water, a package of sandwich bags, and a bag of ice. He drove for seventy-five miles clutching a sandwich bag of melting ice. By the time he found a nondescript and cheap motel off the main drag, the swelling had gone down. He could clench his fist without bone grating on bone. Maybe it wasn't broken, after all. He swallowed two more aspirins, anyway.</p><p>He parked the El Diablo where the motel would shade it for much of the day, and also where it would be out of sight. He registered as Hatch McPeale, because it was the kind of motel where, if you paid for three nights in advance, you didn't need to show a driver's license.</p><p>He holed up, nursed his aching hand, ate breakfast in the coffee shop and dinner at the fast-food joint across the road. The rest of the time he stayed in the room and did simple finger-wrist-and-palm exercises. The intense pain faded, and the dull ache that followed he could deal with.</p><p>But the eight-ball had been a formidable, though improvised, missile. And for no reason he had kept it, maybe as a reminder not to turn his back on a poor loser.</p><p>In a pawn shop in Dry Wells, Stan bought a fancy cane. In Redrock, he found a specialist carpenter, a wiry little guy about eighty years old. Stan explained what he wanted. The little old man thought. "Bakelite, I think," he said, hefting the ball. "If I'm careful, I can drill into it and cement in a threaded socket. Then I can match that with a threaded bolt on top of the cane. That should do her."</p><p>"How much?" Stan asked.</p><p>"I never done something like this with no billiard ball," the guy said. "But tell you what, if you'll let me off if I mess up the job and the ball cracks or somethin', say twenty bucks."</p><p>"That will be fine," Stan said, relieved, because he'd expected to pay fifty.</p><p>The old guy seemed to enjoy the job, and when he finished, the ball was firmly affixed to the shaft. Now Stan had a unique walking stick. To any observer, it was a novelty cane with an eight-ball handle. And so it was. However, should he again need a weapon with which to make a point, the cane could be reversed and applied to the head and shoulders of an unpleasant adversary. Stan calculated it would be stout enough to render foes unconscious with only average aiming luck.</p><p>On the fourth day, he packed up for the long drive to Henderson. Then, if luck was really with him, Stan expected he could move on to the big time at last.</p><p>Vegas, baby.</p><p>If luck was really with him.</p>
<hr/><p>In the latest of his long string of low-budget motels, Stan woke to the sound of horrible racking coughs. He rolled out of bed and pulled on his pants. The racket came from the next unit, and his first thought was that somebody must have been stabbed in the chest or some deal.</p><p>Stan made sure his key was in his pants pocket, then went next door—the next unit was on the end—and knocked on the door. "Hey, you OK in there?"</p><p>In the midst of the coughing came the hoarse plea, "Help!"</p><p>The door was locked, of course, but the keys for all the rooms had to be similar, and three seconds of sliding and pressing with his own key threw the bolts inside the lock, and he got the door open. The light switch was beside the door, just like in Stan's room.</p><p>When he threw it, the light revealed a very old man lying on his side in the bed, coughing his head off. His face was already purple. He lifted an emaciated hand and waved. "O-oxygen!"</p><p>Stan had to look for it. The tank had fallen on its side and had rolled behind the room's sole armchair. Stan retrieved it, and the old guy told him how to hook it up. In five minutes, the oxygen was flowing through the plastic tubes and into his nose, and he was breathing better, though still rattling and wheezing. "Thanks," the old guy croaked. "Saved my life. For a few days, anyhow."</p><p>The old guy asked apologetically if Stan could sit with him for a little while. "I don't mind dying so much," he explained, "but I'd rather not die alone."</p><p>So they talked as the poor old man gathered a little strength. He introduced himself—Eustace Bellweather—and then muttered, "Stage name. It's really Elmer Braycombe."</p><p>Stan said, "I'm Pinefield. Stetson Pinefield. Friends call me 'Stet.' You seem to be in a bad way, sir."</p><p>"If you're eighty-six and have terminal emphysema, yeah, you can say that," Bellweather agreed. "You certainly don't hail from the Silver State, Mr. Pinefield. Do my auditory organs deceive me, or are you a native of New York State?"</p><p>"Close," Stan said. "New Jersey. You said 'stage name.' You an actor?"</p><p>"An actor, he asks!" said Bellweather. He had another brief coughing fit. "I condescend to actors! I hold their profession in disdain. No, sir, my vocation is higher and more esoteric. I am a premier prestidigitator, sleight-of-hand artist, <em>jongleur extraordinaire, </em>and manipulator of the pasteboards. In short, sir, I glory in the ancient and honorable profession of stage magician." He said all this with many pauses for drawing long, shallow breaths.</p><p>"Why are you here on your lonesome?" Stan asked. "You're sick and need help, right?"</p><p>"The curse of living too long," Bellweather said. "I've outlived two wives and three children. I have grown grandchildren, two of them, but I lost track of them twenty years ago. I'm just waiting for the end. Mr. Pinefield—"</p><p>"Stet," Stan said. "Just call me that."</p><p>"Stet, then. You've been very kind to a stranger. Look in the drawer of the bedside table. I'll teach you a trick or two, if you wish."</p><p>Stan found three unwrapped decks of cards. With Bellweather propped up in bed and manipulating one deck and Stan mirroring him with the other, the old man taught the younger one an assortment of card tricks, some basic—levitation, the obedient ace, the bilocating queen, hide-and-seek, and a few others. A couple of hours passed.</p><p>"You're good with your hands," Bellweather said. "You could get real good at this, Stet." He lay back. "I think I could sleep now. Thank you much, Stet."</p><p>Stan glanced at the clock. It was past three A.M. "You gonna be OK?"</p><p>"For the nonce," Bellweather said. "I shall not expire for a few weeks yet, provided I can get to my oxygen. May I ask a favor, sir?"</p><p>"Ask away," Stan said.</p><p>"Would you mind checking on me tomorrow when you arise? My medical advisor will send around fresh oxygen tanks, but I would like to be at least up and dressed when they arrive."</p><p>"Sure thing," Stan said.</p><p>He didn't get up until nine the next morning. At Bellweather's request, he had taken the older man's key, and after knocking on the door and getting a hoarse "Come in," he went in and helped Bellweather get out of bed and dress in trousers that were too large for him and a shirt that draped like a tent. "I've lost weight," the older man said apologetically.</p><p>"Want to go out for breakfast?" Stan asked.</p><p>"I'd weigh you down."</p><p>So Stan went next door to a pancake place and ordered takeout. He brought back scrambled eggs and silver-dollar pancakes and two coffees, and he and Bellweather had breakfast together.</p><p>"Twenty years ago," Bellweather said after they had finished and Stan had disposed of the trash, "I was at the pinnacle of success. I headlined in the Splendor—that used to be the jewel in the crown of the Vegas Strip—and appeared as a guest on innumerable television spectaculars. Alas, age and infirmity caught up to me and I have not worked in the last seven years. I feel like the last leaf on a poor dying tree."</p><p>At noon, a male nurse visited with replacement oxygen. Stan stepped outside as he was leaving to have a word with him. "How's the old guy doin'?" Stan asked.</p><p>The nurse, a burly African-American guy with a kind face, shook his head. "Won't be with us much longer. He ought to be in hospice, but—he's stubborn. Doesn't want to die in a hospital, he says."</p><p>"Tough."</p><p>Something that Stan had noticed about himself was that he didn't do favors all that often. But once he'd done a small one, he was more willing to do a large one. He told Mr. Bellweather, "Hey, if you need to go out or anything, I'm not like working a regular job, so just ask me."</p><p>Almost shyly, Bellweather asked him if he would take him to visit one of the casinos—the Orientale. He had a folding wheelchair, and Stan pushed him in that. In the neon-dim game room, Bellweather settled back, his hands folded on his thighs, and nodded. "Used to be the Splendor," he said. "The stage was over there. That whole end was the restaurant." He gestured. "No use doing a first-class magic act in here. Too much noise." To be sure, the clatter and jangle and constant ding-ding-dings of one-armed bandits was overpowering.</p><p>They ate in town, then Stan drove Bellweather back to the motel. On the drive back, Bellweather offered a bargain: "I have some savings, Stet. Not a fortune, but a few thousand. If you will be my companion for a month or six weeks, I'll be pleased to make a will in your favor. Once the expenses of my cremation are deducted, you will be my heir."</p><p>"That ain't fair," Stan said. "You got grandchildren. Family comes first."</p><p>"Not with me," Bellweather said sadly. "Some years ago, I did try to re-establish bonds of family feality with Chad and Bonita. They rebuffed me, suspecting, I believe, that I was destitute and wished to batten upon their largess for the remainder of my earthly existence. In short, they slammed their doors on me."</p><p>"I kind of know how that feels," Stan said. "Yeah, I guess I can help you out."</p><p>The following day, Stan took Bellweather to his doctor. The doctor examined him, prescribed refills for some medications, then had a word with Stanley. "Are you family?" he asked.</p><p>"Just a friend and student of his," Stan said. The last part was true—every day he and Bellweather spent a few hours on card tricks and manipulations.</p><p>"He ought to be in hospice," the doctor said. "It won't be long now. I'd guess a month at most. He's going downhill pretty fast."</p><p>"I'll take care of him," Stan said.</p><p>At Bellweather's insistence, they saw a storefront lawyer long enough for Bellweather to make out a simple will.</p><p>After three weeks, Bellweather was too weak to get out of bed. Stan sat beside him, helped him with eating and bathroom requirements, and listened to him talk, reminiscing of the days when he was Mr. Mystic, Eustace Bellweather, Master of the Cards. And teaching.</p><p>Finally one morning, he told Stan, "I'm a little tired. I think I'll nap before our lesson." By then Stan had to lean close to hear the weak voice. "You're a good son," he said.</p><p>He went quietly to sleep and never woke up again.</p><p>Stan wept.</p>
<hr/><p>The lawyer took care of everything that was left. The coroner made out the death certificate—cause, respiratory distress. The funeral home cremated the body and gave Stan the urn. Stan spread the ashes in the desert, as Bellweather had requested in his will. After medical and funeral expenses, Stan, to his stunned surprise, got a check in the amount of $27,365.32. He'd been trying to build up his nut for a casino experiment, and here it was, dumped in his lap.</p><p>And—he now had a greater understanding of cards to boot.</p><p>So when he dressed up to visit a casino in Vegas, he checked his appearance in the mirror and told his reflection, "This here's a memorial service for Mr. Mystic, Eustace Bellweather, the Master of the Cards. Let's make sure he rests in peace."</p><p>It went well. He went in with a limit of $7500 and came out with a little over nine thou, a net win of about $1700.</p><p>And he met a charming girl, Marilyn Sillby, who for a wonder didn't work in a casino and wasn't a party girl, if you know what I mean. She was, of all things, a librarian who made just piddling bets—she favored the slot machines, but never wasted more than twenty bucks on them at a time—and she loved to watch card games, though she was too timid and unsure of her card knowledge to join in the games.</p><p>She'd hung around the table as Stan played a game of Texas Hold 'Em—not his favorite game, but hey, it was poker—in a party of ten. He was the first of the group to give up his spot, and that was when he was just a little ahead.</p><p>Stan, getting up, saw Marilyn and grinned at her. "Quit when you're ahead, right?"</p><p>She smiled back. "I suppose," she said. "I was rooting for you."</p><p>"Want to take my seat?"</p><p>"No, I never play poker. I'm not smart enough."</p><p>"You look pretty bright to me! Hey, you had dinner yet?"</p><p>She shook her head. "No. But I can't eat with a stranger."</p><p>"I'm no stranger! I'm Stet Pinefield. And I'd be honored if you'd join me for dinner. No strings attached. I'm lonely, and I'd love the company. We can eat in the Crown Room, right here in the casino. What do you say?"</p><p>She looked at his smiling face. "Nothing else? Just dinner?"</p><p>"That's it. I won't even offer to see you home."</p><p>"Well—"</p><p>Long and short, they had dinner together. Stan awed her with a few card tricks. "That's amazing!" she said when he made the card she'd picked out and reinserted in the deck—it was the Jack of Hearts—rise mysteriously out of the pack. "How'd you learn that?"</p><p>Stan looked sad. "Great old magician taught it to me. He's gone now."</p><p>As the weeks passed, they became an item. Stan's slow campaign went on, casino by casino. He never lost more than a couple of thousand, never won more than three thousand at a time, but slowly he built up his bank account. Stan restricted his gambling days to three a week. The other days, he practiced with his cards and his dice and—every afternoon and most evenings—he dated Marilyn Sillby. They saw shows, they went to movies, they took a long drive to see the Hoover Dam and the western rim of the Grand Canyon.</p><p>After five dates, Marilyn kissed him. As he went back to his hotel room—alone—Stan mentally counted. Since Carla, he had kissed . . . three women. Four now. In eight years.</p><p>Pathetic.</p><p>By November 1980, Stan had upped his bankroll to over sixty thousand. It was a high mark. He was feeling confident and was beginning to think the time had come to move on from Vegas. There were other gambling spots, in and out of the USA, and maybe the grass was greener there.</p><p>However, he didn't want to leave Marilyn.</p><p>Did he love her? Well—he wasn't as nuts about her as he had been about Carla, but she had a good sense of humor, she was sweet and caring, and he supposed they would be very compatible.</p><p>So he steeled himself to pop the question. He invested in a diamond ring, even. It was nice, but not a stunner by any means.</p><p>And as he planned to ask her the big question, he had no inkling that fate was waiting around the corner holding a blackjack and snickering.</p>
<hr/><p>He had not hit the Golden Spurs yet. It was a joint rumored to be owned, or at least controlled by, the mob. The slots there had been rigged to pay off often—sucker bait, because some of the handle pumpers would be drawn to the high-stakes tables, where the odds definitely favored the house.</p><p>It was the kind of casino that did not like to part with money. Stan had listened to word on the street and, by assessing the veracity of the hoi polloi, as Bellweather might have put it, he had decided that winning ten to twelve thousand was safe. Anything over that, no. A big winner might be plied with free alcohol and inveigled into an outrageously rigged game whilst inebriated, or, more direct, thugs could just jump him on the way out. If he put up much of a fight or threatened to go to the authorities, he could be taken for a ride out in the desert and left there to contemplate the desolation from three or four feet under the surface of it.</p><p>To be conservative, Stan decided that he'd win no more than nine thousand. Then he and Marilyn could search for those greener pastures.</p><p>At two P.M. on the day he planned to hit the Golden Spurs, Stan took Marilyn's hand and said, "Sweetheart, I'm in love with you. I think we'd make a great couple. I'd like to marry you and make a life with you and give you everything your heart desires. Up front, I'm not rich, but one way or another, I can always make a decent living. Will you marry me?"</p><p>He offered the ring. She gazed at it, then at him. "You're a real gentleman, Stet," she said. "Yes, I will."</p><p>And Vegas being Vegas, at three that afternoon they visited a chapel and got hitched. However, Stan confessed to her that his real name wasn't Stetson Pinefield, but Stanley Pines. And as Stanley Pines, he married Marilyn Sillby. Their honeymoon took place in his hotel room from three PM to seven. Then they went to dinner. And then they went to the Golden Spur.</p><p>As soon as they walked onto the gambling floor, a huge lug of a guy, one of the bouncers, said, "Come with me" to Stan.</p><p>Stan looked at the guy, an ugly man with a glass eye.</p><p>He'd seen that mug before.</p><p>He'd broken a chair over his head.</p><p>It was the goon who'd once attacked Eddie Pinter.</p><p>And he looked like he wanted revenge.</p><p>"Honey," Stan said to Marilyn, "You better—"</p><p>Right there in front of everybody, the hood slugged him.</p><p>And the dinging slots faded, the neon darkened, and Stan was down for the count.</p>
<hr/><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Homecoming and the Test of the Bow</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Secret Odyssey of Stanley Pines</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1971-1982)</em>
</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>12: Homecoming and the Test of the Bow</strong>
</p><p>
  <em>(1980-1982)</em>
</p><p>See the pretty lights, red and orange and yellow and green and blue and purple and that one that you never do know the name of, spinning around and around and around. It's like a laser show plus pain. And how do they make the lights brighten and dim to the beat of your pulse?</p><p>Somebody kicked his ankle, hard. It took all his grit, but Stan just let his foot roll loose and did not react. He realized he sat, or rather slumped, or better yet schlumped, in a chair, loose-jointed, eyelids closed, and with a pounding headache.</p><p>"Punk's still out, Boss," said a somehow familiar, hard voice. I know that voice. <em>It's . . . Leary. The hood with the tire iron that beat up on Pinter.</em></p><p>"Don't rough him up no more," said a weaselly, soft voice. If goose grease could talk, it would sound like that. "Rico wants to do most of the damage himself."</p><p>"I owe him one," Leary said. "He knocked me out with a wooden chair! Then the SOB dumped me and Razor naked in these godawful woods they got out there in Jersey—"</p><p>"Wasn't him," the soft voice said. "I found out about that. Was Pinky ordered that."</p><p>Leary didn't want to turn loose of it. Stan got the feeling that the man had very few ideas, and so he gripped each one until it rotted in his brain. "Yeah, maybe Pinter ordered it, but I'll bet my last nickel that this guy carried it out."</p><p>A phone rang. At first Stan thought it was just noise in his head, maybe his brains clinking together, but then the soft voice said, "Put him through."</p><p>Leary started to ask a question: "You want I should—"</p><p>The other guy shushed him and then spoke into the phone: "Yeah. Yeah, it's me, shoot. It's him. How do I know? This guy matches the picture you faxed. How much is he into you? That much? Yeah, we can deliver him for a price. Relax, the guy has fifteen grand on him, that'll do. Yeah, I'll send a couple good guys. Where? Wait a minute, I'll write it down. Dago? Is that safe? Yeah, OK. No, he should be able to talk when he comes around. Tonight? Gotta be? OK, but—OK, OK, keep your shirt on, I'll send him tonight." The sound of a phone being hung up, then the soft voice again: "Slugs, you and Weenie. You gotta drive this mutt to San Diego tonight."</p><p>"Aw, come on, Boss. That'll take all night!"</p><p>"You can be there by two A.M. No big deal. I got the address. You get there, they'll be watching for you, they'll open the garage and you just drive in and wait. They'll take him off your hands. Make sure that garage door's closed before you haul him out."</p><p>"No more beat-down?"</p><p>"Nope, they want him in shape to answer questions. I'll call Doc Needles, get him to fix Weenie up with a hypo of sleepy juice, that'll keep him quiet. No rough stuff, understand? You know how crazy Rico is. Don't buy yourself trouble. Our pal there won't come out of it in one piece, anyways. Maybe you ask nice, Rico might let you watch."</p><p>Stan thought at first that he heard thunder, but it was just the big guy—Slugs Leary, evidently—laughing.</p><hr/><p>Half an hour later they threw ice water in his face, and he pretended to come around, sluggishly. "What happen'?" he slurred.</p><p>"Mr. Pines." He opened his eyes and saw the soft voice belonged to a runty little guy in a bad-fitting tux. His face looked like a skull with too little skin stretched over it. His head was a bleak dome with thinning black hair unfortunately slicked back in strands over a pale scalp. The guy was leaning back in an executive chair meant for a bigger and more important man. "You got an appointment in San Diego. You won't need to pack."</p><p>"San Diego?" Stan asked, blinking stupidly. "And who's this Pines? My name's Stetson Pinefield. From Sandusky, Ohio."</p><p>"We won't argue the point," the guy said. "Only you told the wedding chapel the name was Pines." He stood, and Stan saw he was holding a Colt .45, silver, in a casual grip. The unlovely hunk of metal made his words have considerably more weight. The unblinking eye of the gun twitched. "Get up."</p><p>Stan looked around. "I can't," he muttered. "I need my walkin' stick."</p><p>Boss man pushed a button on his desk. Slugs's slow voice buzzed out of an intercom: "Yeah?"</p><p>"Come make this guy walk," he said.</p><p>The big one-eyed guy shambled in and grabbed the scruff of Stan's neck and hauled him up. Stan wailed and fell to the ground like a bag of cement. "Leary! Don't hurt my leg no more, please!" he begged.</p><p>"Whaddaya mean?" Slugs asked, kicking him in the side.</p><p>"Ow! Last time we fought, you busted my leg! Busted it in three, no, four places! The docs wanted to saw it off, but I wouldn't let 'em! But it won't hold my weight no more. I'll go quiet, but if I gotta walk, I'll need my walkin' stick. Mister, don't let this guy hurt me no more. Please!"</p><p>"You busted the guy's leg?" boss man asked, sounding interested.</p><p>"Yeah, he nearly killed me!" Stanley said. "I finally got him with a chair, but my leg was a mess—bones stickin' through every which way, blood squirtin' like ketchup, agony! Agony! It took me three years—no, four years—to even learn how to walk again, and I'll hafta use a cane until the day I die, and even at that, every step is like knives in my knee! Knives!"</p><p>"You didn't tell me you busted his leg so bad," the gun guy said to Slugs.</p><p>"Yeah," Leary said with dumb pride. "I guess I did get in some pretty good licks."</p><p>Stan flinched and cowered, but he was thinking, <em>He don't remember anything. But he'll take the credit for hurtin' me!</em></p><p>Boss man looked at Stan's leg—which he had crooked so it looked unnatural—and then said, "Give the guy his cane."</p><p>"But—"</p><p>"Am I talkin'? Are you deaf? The cane, Slugs, get the cane!"</p><p>And fifteen minutes later, Stan limped slowly out to the casino parking garage, groaning with every step as he leaned on the eight-ball cane. They were going in a Chevy, he saw, a new gold-colored Impala. A guy no more than five foot two, whom Stan guessed was Weenie, perched behind the steering wheel.</p><p>"You get to ride shotgun," Leary said, prodding Stan's spine with the Colt. "I'mma be right behind you, only I got the gun. Get it? <em>You're</em> ridin' shotgun, but you ain't got one, only<em> I</em> got a gun. Haw!"</p><p>"Funny," Stan said between clenched teeth.</p><p>"Hey, Slugs, before we start, we're gonna need to gas up," Weenie said.</p><p>"So drive down to the garage level."</p><p>The garage level was private—Weenie opened a gate with one of those electric-eye, remote-control things to head down a corkscrew ramp—and at the bottom, just like in a gas station, in a narrow space stood three fuel pumps. Beyond the was a turnaround area. Stan saw you had to go up the same ramp you came down.</p><p>"Gonna take a while," Weenie said as he opened the driver's door. "This thing holds like twenty-one gallons, and these damn pumps are slow."</p><p>"I'm glad I don't have to stand up and pump it," Stan muttered. "I'm feelin' kinda rocky."</p><p>He felt the cold kiss of the Colt on the nape of his neck. "Get out," Leary said in a pleased voice. "Fill 'er up and check the oil, water, and tire pressure. Haw!"</p><p>"Please, no," Stan said. "Ain't you hurt me enough?"</p><p>"We could find out."</p><p>"Your boss told you not to rough me up. Rico won't like it."</p><p>Confidently, Leary said, "I got ways that even Rico can't spot. Out. Now."</p><p>Stan made a big production of groaning and limping. Weenie stood on one side of him, leaning against the driver's side front door. Leary stood to Stan's right, a few feet away, his Colt in his big paw. "Weenie," he rumbled. "Unlock the pump. High test, loser."</p><p>Weenie found a key on the keychain and unlocked a padlock securing the pump nozzle. Stanley opened the Chevy's fuel hatch. "This gas cap's locked, too," he said, tottering as if his bum leg were about to give way.</p><p>Weenie cursed, pushed Stan back a step, stooped over, and fitted another key into the gas cap.</p><p>And from where he'd stepped, Stan was at an ideal distance from Leary. He swung hard. With a sound like a coconut bouncing off somebody's bean, the eight-ball plonked into the center of Leary's forehead. As the big guy went loose as a marionette with no strings, Weenie jerked in terror and spun, fumbling at his waistband, yelling, "Wha—?"</p><p>On the rebound, the eight-ball caught him upside his head.</p><p>Stan rifled through their pockets. In Weenie's jeans was a leather case, and inside it a note and a 20-cc hypodermic syringe with a little cork on the sharp bit. The note said, <em>Thigh or butt</em>. <em>Half a dose=8 hrs. Other half if he's resistant.</em></p><p>Stan made a face as he tugged their pants down just far enough to stab them each in the upper bulge of buttock, giving twelve cc's to Slugs Leary and eight to the smaller Weenie. He took the Colt from Slugs and a .32 revolver from Weenie's waistband. He removed the cartridges from both.</p><p>He also relieved Leary of about six hundred dollars from his flashy hand-tooled wallet. In another pocket, Stan found his own wallet and took it, too—his ID was there, but no cash. That done, grunting with effort, he hoisted Leary into the trunk without bothering about being gentle. He tumbled Weenie in on top of the bigger guy, slammed the trunk lid, and found it was bouncing off Weenie's legs. He rearranged him and then shut the trunk.</p><p>Hurrying then, not even bothering to fill the tank, he started the Chevy and, crouching low in case there were TV cameras, drove back up the ramp to the first parking level. He fumbled around with the electric-eye remote, got the gate open, and then headed out on the street. He turned toward bright lights and came to the next big casino—the Platinum Waterfall—and found an empty slot in its huge parking lot.</p><p>Inside the casino, he changed a ten-spot for quarters, hunted the pay phones, and then called his room at the hotel. Marilyn answered, sounding terrified: "Hello?"</p><p>"Baby, its me. No names! You know my voice. Don't say my name! Listen, get my spare keys, pack my bags, and drive my car to the Platinum Waterfall. I'll meet you on the corner just past it. Listen, babe, I got some real bad guys on my tail. Here's what we're gonna do. I should have about thirty thousand in cash, You're gonna take that, all the fifties and hundreds, that's yours. Leave me all the twenties and tens and under, should be less than a thousand. I want you to get the marriage annulled and forget me."</p><p>"S—I mean—I can't just—"</p><p>"Baby," he said softly, "you gotta. I may go under before this is over. No way am I gonna drag you under with me. You're an angel. Make some lucky guy a great wife—only it can't be me."</p><hr/><p>He drove her from Nevada into Twin Falls, Idaho, where she had a sister. It was a long drive, and before it was over, Stan had persuaded her to agree. "But—thirty thousand dollars, Stanley!"</p><p>"It's your wedding present," he said tenderly. "Also your alimony. I want you to have it, Marilyn. I know you don't love me. I was hoping that one day you would, but right now, it's just liking, right?"</p><p>"I could love you real easily," she whispered.</p><p>"I wish it could be different. Listen, I'm gonna give you the phone number of a relative of mine, name's Vinnie. When you get the annulment, I want you to call him. Send him a photocopy of the papers, in case anybody ever needs them to prove you're shed of me. Kiss me now, and I'll walk you to the door. Wait until I leave before you ring your sister's doorbell. It's better if she doesn't see me."</p><p>It was the sweetest kiss that Stan could remember, long and warm and tender.</p><p>Funny thing, in the days to come, it would return to hurt him much worse than his imaginary shattered leg could ever have done.</p><hr/><p>Stan had no idea how to get in touch with Rico Bécilo. However, through Irving, Stan communicated with someone in Eddie Pinter's outfit, and he knew. Stan placed a long-distance call from Idaho to offer Rico the key to the lockbox and the assurance that whatever was in the metal container was still there.</p><p>Rico offered to cut him up into little pieces and feed him to the sharks.</p><p>There didn't seem much middle ground for compromise.</p><p>In a desperate bid to recoup something, anything, over the next weeks Stan pawned the two handguns, found out where to get some cheap fake ID, and became Andrew "8-Ball" Alcatraz. Next he got his hands on some decent enough Chinese-manufactured vacuum cleaners, and had some stencils made so he could turn them into Stanco Stan-Vacs. Probably because he was jumpy, he unsuccessfully peddled them door to door in Idaho and Iowa with the slogan <em>The Stan-Vac Sucks More than Anything!</em></p><p>Two things made sales slow. First, he really should have put more thought into that slogan. Second, desperate for human contact, he made a long-distance collect call to his cousin Vinnie—and got the bad news that further rattled his nerves and made it difficult to concentrate.</p><p>"Stan," Vinnie said, "The girl, Marilyn, she says the thing's done and she sent me an envelope for you. She seems like a sweetheart."</p><p>"Yeah, she is," Stan said. "Thanks, Vinnie. What's wrong? You sound nervous."</p><p>Vinnie said, "Well, not nervous so much, Stan, so much as worried. I guess you ain't heard about your pop, huh?"</p><p>"What—what about him?" Stan asked, already guessing.</p><p>"He had a heart attack, first thing one morning, he just got up and keeled over."</p><p>Stan's mouth was dry. "When?"</p><p>"It was like three months ago. Yeah, September of this year. He's back home, but his ticker's not too good. Your mom's just sold off the business. Stan—she's not real well herself. I don't know what's the matter, but—well, you know. Anyhow, they're moving into a condo. They got savings, you know, and—hey. I'm sorry to have nothing but bad news."</p><p>"Better to know," Stan said. "Any news from Stanford?"</p><p>"Oh, yeah, he's living in this little dump in Oregon, got it written down here somewhere—Gravity Falls, what kind of name is that? I don't have his address, but I got a phone number. Want it?"</p><p>After half a minute, Vinnie asked, "Stan? You there?"</p><p>"Yeah," Stan said, his throat tight. "Yeah, please. Wait, I'm gonna write it down."</p><p>Stan was almost broke. No more investment money left from Pinter's grant. He was reduced to buying scratch-off lottery tickets—a losing proposition all around. He allowed himself one a week and never won a penny. And even though things looked bleak, it still took another couple of weeks before Stan broke down and dialed Ford's number. And then when his twin answered, "Hello, this is Stanford Pines," Stan immediately hung up. What could he possibly say?</p><p>He dumped most of the remaining vacuums for less than he'd paid for them. He headed south. OK, he'd confront Rico, smooth-talk him into accepting the key and the emeralds or whatever in exchange for calling it quits. And if Rico still wanted to whack him—</p><p>"Not like I got a lot to live for," Stan told himself.</p><p>But in Phoenix, he happened to spot a building with a sign that read <em>Federal Bureau of Investigation Arizona Office. </em>Increasingly sure that Rico would not be inclined to accept his peaceful overtures, Stan stopped at a post office and bought an envelope and postcard. On the postcard, he wrote, "Rico Bécillo has some loot stashed in a safe-deposit rental joint on Calle 35, Cartagena, Colombia. Interpol might be able to trap him if you get a good undercover guy to offer this key as bait for a meet with him there. Good luck."</p><p>He put the card in the envelope and addressed it to FBI at the street address of the office.</p><p>So maybe the Feds could make it work. Maybe not. Maybe he still would be forced to have a sit-down with Rico.</p><p>In that case, he didn't think his chances were good.</p><p>Trying to hide out for a while, he stopped the car in a horrible little New Mexico town called Dead End Flats. It had one street. He took a room at the cheapest of all the motels he'd ever stayed at, and that was saying something. He placed another long-distance call, to the manager of the Golden Spurs Casino in Vegas. When he finally got put through, he recognized the soft voice.</p><p>"Hey, Stanley Pines here," he said. "How's it hangin'?"</p><p>The man didn't sound angry. "You. After Weenie and Slugs recovered enough, Rico made me send them to him so they could explain why they didn't bring you to him. They won't never come back no more."</p><p>"Well," Stan said, "in case Rico still wants me, I might be able to arrange a meet now. I'll call you back in three days to check in."</p><p>"You don't call me," the guy said. "I call you. Where are you holed up?"'</p><p>"Nuh-uh," Stan said. "I'll call you later."</p><p>He hung up the pay phone and then telephoned Vinnie. "Hey, cuz," he said, "listen, this is Stanley, and I'm in a fix. I'm not sure what's gonna happen to me in the next week, but let me tell you where I am. Write this down: 005 Dead End Flats, New Mexico. Two zeroes, right, they got a cockamamie way of numbering the houses. And this here that I'm talking on's a pay phone, but if you call it, the motel guy might give me a message." He added the phone number.</p><p>"You sound awful serious," Vinnie said.</p><p>"I kinda am," Stan said. "This may be the last place on Earth where anybody ever hears from me while I'm still alive. So long, Vinnie. Look out for yourself."</p><p>That evening, he realized that just possibly Mr. Golden Spurs might have traced his call. And if somebody knew it came from Dead End Flats, well, the only place where Stan could have rented a room was the Bates Motel ("As homey as Mom's place"). He spent that night and the next with a baseball bat close to hand. On the third night, as he was trying to get up the nerve to call the Golden Spurs again, he heard someone at the door.</p><p>Panicking, Stan grabbed his Louisville slugger and yelled, "Just give me a few more days, Rico! I'll pay your goons back, I swear!"</p><p>But it was only the mailman. Stan peered through the mail slot and saw the old fellow walk away. It was already dark—night came early, it was close to Christmas, 1981—and the postman had left him a card from Gravity Falls, Oregon. According to the postmark, it had been mailed the morning before. Quick work by the U.S.P.O.</p><p>He turned the card over. It was from Stanford Pines, 618 Gopher Road, Gravity Falls, Oregon. And addressed to him, here. Damn, Vinnie must've called Ford straight off to give him that information in time for Ford to get that card to him so quick!</p><p>And there was a message:</p><hr/><p>
  <strong>PLEASE COME! -FORD</strong>
</p><hr/><p>Stan had about six Stan-Vacs left, and a couple hundred in cash, counting a bag of quarters. He immediately packed the car and set off, driving north. He doubted he had enough dough for both gas and food, but he'd gone without food before. And there were pawn shops. Worst come to worst, he could get twenty bucks for each Stan-Vac.</p><p>And—this was the most important consideration—he would be heading away from New Mexico, from San Diego, and from the murderous Rico.</p><p>It was a no-brainer.</p><hr/><p>Stan probably should have phoned ahead, but hey, Ford had invited him. He drove north through New Mexico, cut into Arizona, did well enough until he got to Flagstaff—and then a tire blew. Though he settled for retreads, the cost meant he'd probably be without gas money by the time he got halfway through Utah.</p><p>So, sleeping in his car and doing his morning wash-up in the men's rooms of gas stations, Stan did a quick sales swing. He hit houses with two cars, his and hers, and instead of asking for the lady of the house—standard for most vacuum-cleaner salesmen—he spoke to the gentleman. "Is it looking like a good Christmas? Got the presents for the Missus already?"</p><p>He explained that every woman loved the Stan-Vac. "It makes cleanup a game," he claimed. "And this is such a special deal. Normally, these beauties go for one hundred and eighty dollars apiece. However, these are the last of the model year, and so as long as I have any left, I'm authorized to let gentlemen like you buy them for only one hundred dollars even—that's forty-five per cent off! And don't you think she'll just beam with joy when she finds this under the tree!"</p><p>He stopped maybe fifty times, and in the end, he sold three for a hundred even, two for seventy-five dollars down, and one—"OK, sir, thanks for letting me show you this little beauty. Hey, long shot, but you know what? Since this is my demo model, if you'd like to surprise the little woman, take this off my hands for fifty bucks!"</p><p>With his wallet five hundred bucks above the empty notch, he trekked on. By the time he reached Idaho, snow was flying thick and fast. He was forced to hit second-hand shops for a warm hooded jacket, heavy gloves, a toboggan cap, and boots.</p><p>He wasn't used to driving in snow, and traveling became slow and difficult. Sometimes roads or bridges were closed; other times there were even avalanches or snowdrifts that stopped him dead for a few days. Finally, though, in mid-January, he made it as far as the town of Gravity Falls. Unfortunately, he arrived in a blinding blizzard. After too much skidding and sliding, Stan stopped in the town and found the city hall with the lights on—it was only two P.M. but the blinding snow made it seem like evening. He parked the Stanleymobile, got out and fought the wind to the front door of City Hall, got it open, and popped in to warm himself and get directions.</p><p>The only city official on duty was the mayor, a squatty, crazy-looking old geezer. He explained that in this current storm it would be days before the county could scrape Gopher Road. "It's steep too," the old fellow warned. "Even with chains or snow tires you couldn't get a car up there now. Might be able to walk. If you tripped, it'd be like a snow slide the whole mile back to town. Whee!"</p><p>With the wind and snow buffeting him, it was a grueling hike. Stan stuck to the shoulder of the road, gasping for breath in the frigid, snow-whipped wind. Finally he emerged near a clearing and saw a dark bulk ahead that proved to be a log cabin—and that was what he'd been told to watch out for. Close to exhaustion, Stan waded through nine inches of snow to the porch and took a deep breath. Even now, he thought, it wasn't too late to turn back, though he'd probably freeze to death before making it back to town. But he told himself, "You haven't seen your brother in over ten years. It's OK. He's family. He won't bite."</p><p>He knocked on the door. It flew open, and his brother yelled, "Who is it? Have you come to steal my eyes?"</p><p>Stan leaned back, startled. Stanford was aiming a loaded crossbow right at him, from only a foot away. Sarcastically, he said, "Well, I can always count on you for a warm welcome."</p><p>Ford blinked, lowered the crossbow, and stammered, "Stanley! Did anyone follow you? Anyone at all?"</p><p>"Hello to you, too, pal," said Stan.</p><p>Ford grabbed his jacket and yanked him inside. Then he shined a flashlight right in Stan's eyes. When Stan objected, Ford looked ashamed. "Sorry, I just had to make sure you weren't . . . uh, it's nothing. Come in, come in."</p><p>Stan studied his brother's face. He was pale, haggard. Stan said, "You know Dad had a heart attack, don't you?"</p><p>"Of course, of course. I couldn't go home, but—Stanley, it's good you're here."</p><p>Stan relaxed for the first time. Now, he thought, now it was going to be all right. Forget Rico. Forget the cops in all the states that might still be on the lookout for him. Heck with them.</p><p>He was with his brother again. The odyssey was over at last. He was home.</p><p>They'd never be separated again.</p><p>Or so he thought.</p><hr/><p>The End</p>
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